What we have to recall is that open data, data.gc.ca, is a movement that is basically only three years old, with our formal joining of the Open Government Partnership in 2012. We are still, throughout the federal public service and even in the provinces, territories, and municipalities, in a learning mode. We started off in late 2011 with six departments; we're now at 38 departments and have more than 200,000 data sets.
We're learning, both the users of open data, including the academics, the students,and the non-profits who are using this data, and also those of us within the public service. For instance, as part of our preparation for the CODE hackathon, we named in each department an open data coordinator and worked very hard with the coordinators across the major departments, first to identify high-value data sets, and second to bring them together to ensure that those data sets were properly described, so that users coming online to download them could understand what was in each field and could work on the data properly.
What we found in having these workshops—which we regularly do, and now we have a user community of open data coordinators across the federal government—is that we are all learning together and that in fact departments are coming together. As a result of students working on the CODE hackathon and observing how they use the data, we have learnings that we're bringing back and incorporating into our plans to release more data sets in the future to make them more comprehensible to the average Canadian as well as easier to download in the appropriate formats, and so on.
But three years is still very early days. We're very pleased with our progress, but we expect there will be more education to come.