Thank you. I had no idea that the member was going to start his remarks by such a gratifying description of my abilities.
I think in some areas it's a bit lumpy. In some areas we're ahead or among the leaders, and in other areas we are catching up, but we're catching up quickly. It is one of these things where, because we have the Open Government Partnership now in place with 60 countries, we can start comparing and contrasting. I would say, because we're an advanced industrialized country with an advanced democracy, a number of things we're doing have a degree of sophistication, which I think is commendable. On the other side, when you're dealing with developing countries, their rate of catch-up is accelerating, but they started from a place far behind where we were. That's, I think, the reality of the situation.
When I talk to my counterparts about 200,000 data sets online, they are impressed. They see that as a very impressive total. I'll say this on the record. The United States had a contest where they were trying to encourage more citizen participation in app development. We took it to the next stage with our Canadian open data experience. I think ours was, at the end of the day, a superior process. When we started the process of organizing CODE, my stretch goal was maybe 100 participants. This was a brand new initiative. It was maybe of interest to computer science departments and a couple of other designers, and that kind of thing. To have 900 Canadians, a lot of them young Canadians who are still in school, participate in that project just blew me away. I was very excited about that, and very excited that they were excited about open data from a government perspective. A lot of them came up to me and said, “We had no idea this stuff was available and online”, and it really is getting their creative juices flowing.
That's how I would answer that question. I'm proud of where we are, but I do know that we have to continue to make progress.