Great. Thank you very much. Merci beaucoup.
First of all, let me thank you for the opportunity to come to speak to you today about some of the work I have been involved in. I guess the reason I'm here, as Ron McKerlie has already said, is that I was the chair of the Ontario government's open government engagement team. We had nine members. We were all from outside government and were asked by the government to go out, travel around the province, and think about the future of open government.
I want to talk a tiny bit about our mandate. In fact, I want to stand back and try to say something from a much more big picture point of view because that's the kind of discussion that we had. We had lots of fine-grained discussions as well. I think Ron has already done an excellent job of saying some of the more important things we had to say about data, so I'm going to stand back and just think about the question of open government and what it actually means for us.
Let me start by saying something about our mandate, and I take it yours, or certainly the Government of Canada's, because there are those three streams as we like to say: open data, open information, and open dialogue, and the Ontario government, when it gave us our mandate, identified those three streams and we thought a lot about this.
First of all, I would say this. My background is that certainly I have lots of experience in e-government and open data, and so on, in the past, but my real interest is in dialogue, collaboration, and engagement. So what am I doing here? Well, it turns out that open dialogue is a really important part of this.
If you look at the Open Government Partnership and I'm sure you all have had lots of discussions around this, like your committee, it's interesting. Ask yourself where most of the focus is around those three streams. Not surprisingly—and this is a good thing, not a bad thing—it turns out that much of it is focused on data. Why is that? Why aren't we talking about information today? Maybe it's your committee's mandate. Why aren't we talking about dialogue today or talking about it only indirectly, although I see a lot of it surfacing in the conversation? I guess what I'd want to say to you—no offence to anybody in the room or outside the room—is that for governments, the easiest thing to do is open data. Guess why? It doesn't really compromise a lot of the traditional forms of governance we have. You don't have to say a lot. You don't have to give away any power. You don't have to open yourself up. There are some risks, and we heard about some of them, but by and large open data is the easiest place to start, and that's a good thing. I'm not opposed to it, folks. It's a great thing.
But what do we need to do after that, or where do we start to go after that? I want to talk just a little about that. It was interesting, our mandate for the open government engagement team was to focus on open government, and in fact, what the government said to us was to spend 60% of our time on open dialogue, 20% on data, and 20% on information. I thought that was really interesting, and the reason they did that was the recognition that it's time we moved the yardsticks on the dialogue piece and began to ask ourselves how do these three things actually fit together and what's the connection between them.
Let me come at this a little bit through the lens of data, and again in a very high level kind of way. First of all, if someone were to ask me, or if I were to ask myself why we would want open data, there are probably at least two very big things that we've heard a fair bit about today. It won't surprise you. We hear about the commercial benefits, right, that if we unlock these natural resources of the future of the information age we will be able to create new products and services, and that's good for the economy and that's good for all of us, and I'm hugely in favour of that.
Another reason, which we probably talk a little less about but we surely have heard about, is evidence-based decision-making. If you want to make good decisions, you need good information, and the availability of data makes that promising and important.
Let me say just a little bit about each of those and the role that dialogue plays in helping us to realize the full potential of open data.
Harvey talked about geography. I want to say a little tiny bit about it as well. You may or may not have heard of the Canadian geomatics round table. It is hosted by Natural Resources Canada, but the geomatics round table is actually quite a remarkable group, a new one. It's developing. It has about 25 or 30 members, and the round table is focused on geomatics information. It's a multi-sectoral partnership. It is a formal partnership or a round table that involves provincial governments, a number of federal departments, NGOs, universities, and a variety of other stakeholders all around the same table.
The basic reason all those people are there is that over the last four or five years it has become increasingly clear that spatial information is hugely important. I think Harvey has done a fabulous job of beginning to point out the complexities of thinking about how we not only need spatial information but also how we're going to use it and what we're going to focus on when we organize and make this available in the future. It's not like there's just something out there called spatial information. It's how we put the stuff together, how we use it, and we can make choices about how we invest our resources and about what's important, whether it's for commercial purposes or other purposes.