Thank you very much.
Thank you for inviting the City of Ottawa and for inviting me to speak today. I've been running the open data program at the city for the last three to four years. To give you a bit of history, I've been working in the municipal IT sector for the last five or six years. I've served on several boards that have been working with open data, and we've been partnering together with other cities. Four of the larger cities, Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver, and Ottawa, have been collaborating on open data for the last three years. As well, there is now a provincial open data group that's working together that I've been participating in. The municipal IT associations have created special interest groups around open data that I'm participating in as well.
Just to give some background, and the city plays host to you so you are aware, we are the fourth-largest city in Canada but largest by land mass for the big cities. We have 17,000-plus employees and a $2.5-billion operating budget. That gives you a sense of comparison, I guess, with the other cities. We're trying to be representative of the cities and how we use open data, and maybe can reflect those.
For the city itself, we initiated open data through a review. We were requested to review our data dissemination policy. Before “open data” took hold as a common term, we were simply looking at mimicking what some of the private sector was doing. Could the city leverage the release of data to tap into primarily the local technology sector to see if it would support them in building solutions for the city, but also to encourage innovation based on what we were seeing from local developers?
We launched in 2010. Our launch was fairly quick and simple. We simply started to put up easy-to-release data sets. For a city, that's pools, park locations, and facilities, stuff that's very common sense to put up. We immediately launched an application development contest to make use of the data, to create awareness, to have people involved, and to start gaining some of the benefits of having the data available.
For the first few years, our focus was on community engagement. That's ongoing. We've continued to do that. It's a critical part. I think any jurisdiction that has gone forward with open data has seen the tremendous value of reaching out to those who use the data. Because the topic itself and the skills required to use the data aren't necessarily in the greater population, you want to reach out to those who can create stuff with it and help deliver the value to the residents or citizens.
Along those lines, we've hosted many events in the city—hackfest may be a term you've heard—where we bring members of the community together. We bring staff along, and we try to encourage the development of applications or services or research based on not only the needs of the city but also what the community groups are interested in. We're on hand to be the experts around the data itself, with the intent that we can focus on being good data providers, of running that and of having good-quality clean data and understanding the topics, but they can help deliver what's of value to the community based on their own needs, or reaching out whether from a profit motive or for community engagement or community development.
We have run several contests along the way that have been successful with Apps4Ottawa. We'll probably be looking to doing a third one in the not-too-distant future. These are useful activities in terms of not only gaining the attention of the public, who do benefit from the outcomes of it, but also reaching out to a broad set of users of the data, going beyond application developers into academics and researchers. It's getting students involved, students in universities and high schools, so that from an early age they can see that open data exists and there's value in it. It can help lead them to greater community engagement, get them involved with their cities and with government, and get them interested in doing their part to contribute to society.
We have had many successes along the way. One of the great things, as we've seen, is that when we launched the open data program we spoke of the benefits that we were hoping to see but we've actually now attained them so it's no longer just theoretical. We have proven cases where open data has shown its value manyfold over. For the cities, we are lucky in a way because we have so many front-line services to deliver and it's very amenable to, say, front-line applications that the public can use. We've seen tremendous benefit whether that's around recreation, transit, traffic, garbage, or recycling. The benefits we see are cost reduction from us not having to develop solutions but also driving new revenue from the city to getting more people to using our recreation programs, our cultural programs, and doing it without further investment from the city.
Finally, one of the most recent developments is a new routine disclosure and proactive dissemination policy that the city has adopted. This is in line with the direction that the Province of Ontario has moved in and aligns with the Privacy Commissioner of Ontario with their access by design. This allows the city, moving beyond open data—it can include open data but what information should the city be proactively disclosing for the same purposes?—to have the information available to the public, to the community groups, to associations and researchers, so they can create the value from it as well as promote transparency and accountability.
I would like to use this time to suggest several recommendations from the point of view of a municipality working around open data of where we would like to see the federal government move or opportunities for them to adopt.
The first is around a common data and it's for the provinces as well. Looking at many of the topics, whether transportation, health, environment, education, governance, or spending, for people to have the complete picture they need the data from all three levels of government and I think the federal government is in a good position to help drive that forward and promote the release from the three levels of government.
The second is around federated data. There would be seemingly tremendous value in having a single place of access for data sets. So if we were all releasing transportation, environmental, or health data, if there were one place to access that data, it would make it more accessible to more users and the federal government's portal could serve as that place. So not only would cities release their data on their sites but they could also be releasing them through the federal portal to simply make it easier to access.
I think the federal government is in a good position to help promote standards for interoperability and policy. I think they've done that through the release of the common licence that they've been promoting which is, in itself, of tremendous value in enabling many people to participate and use open data. I think there's more that can be done in this area specifically around data standards but also in promoting formats that will support interoperability. This is so that data from all the many jurisdictions can be more easily used by those who choose to use it.
The final point is around close engagement with the municipalities. There is, obviously, a separation between the federal government, the provinces, and the cities. There are formal processes in place to help with that collaboration, such as the Public Sector CIO Council; however, it can be limiting in terms of getting that real collaboration between the three levels. I think, whether it's through the federal portal, through other means, if there's a way to connect, say, the bureaucrats at the federal level to the municipalities directly with the provinces involved, we'll have a better outcome for citizens and users of the data.
Thank you for your time. I look forward to your questions and helping you. Again, I appreciate your inviting us to speak and that you are looking at this topic specifically. Thank you very much.