Thanks very much for having me. As ever, it's a really fun thing to be able to come to a committee meeting like this. You probably don't get public servants saying that to you very often but when you're coming from a provincial context, it's really interesting to come and talk to federal colleagues. I prepared a few notes that I'll be referring to. I think our clerk helped me distribute those.
I work in the Ministry of Technology Innovation and Citizens' Services in a particular agency called Government Communications and Public Engagement. I've been in the role that I'm in for about five years now.
The direction I received said, “The committee would like to know your opinion on users' needs in relation to the federal government's open data initiative, the economic and social benefits associated with open data, the best practices in other jurisdictions in relation to open data initiatives, and the importance of collaboration between the various levels of government, federal, provincial, and municipal.” So I'm going to work through each one of those items and I'll start at the beginning.
Let me start by talking about users' needs. I can say a few things about users' needs with respects to open data initiatives mainly because I'm the program lead for one of those. I think that what impacts us in British Columbia is also relevant at the federal level as well. There are seven points that I think are important to focus on.
First and foremost is the findability of data. That is to say, if you're going to be able to provide data to the public in this way, they need to be able to find it. It's pretty straightforward.
But there is also the accessibility of data that is in a means that's really suitable for the people who are coming to use it. A number of technologies are available, things like APIs, web mapping services. We can go into details about what those are in the conversation. Making sure that people can connect to the data in a way that is relevant to them and that serves their needs is really important.
The usability of web interfaces as well as the data itself, including the legal terms that are associated with that data, are critically important.
The quality of the data—that it's correct, complete, consistent, and that it's without redundancy—is also a very important element in the usability of it, a very important need that users are looking for.
Users are also looking for value in data and in particular relevant to particular sectors, especially where they can take that raw data and then turn it into information that is applicable in their particular business context.
Engagement with users to understand their needs and make them aware of the resource and spark collaborative innovations is also an important element. Typically we do see users really wanting to see organizations that are running these types of programs do a significant amount of outreach, to be able to learn from them and be able to work with them and bring them together in community events.
Lastly, users are typically looking for signals of internal culture change that indicate that government is really serious about what it's doing around open data. They're going to be looking for policy statements or statements from political leadership that indicate that government is committed to doing what it's doing. But most of all, they're really interested in seeing government consuming its own data. That really sends a signal that it's committed to the ongoing supply of that data.
We can talk in a lot more detail about any of those points. As far as the federal effort is concerned, I think they're mainly doing a good job across all these different levels and making good progress. Speaking as a program owner, I can tell you too that there's always room for improvement. A good example of that is around improving the findability of data, because data is often described in ways that aren't easy for average users to understand. Often it can be quite self-referential to a field. We need to do a better job of improving in plain language the way that data is described so that more people can find it more easily and understand the opportunity of using it. That's going to be work that will be ongoing. At both the provincial and the federal levels, we will need to continue to do this over a number of years.
As far as the economic and social benefits of open data are concerned, you may be aware that McKinsey and Company estimates the open data opportunity to be worth about $3 trillion in value.
That is an extraordinary number. It blows my mind a little bit that this number is that big. I think it's really interesting. I don't think we've met that potential yet, but it is a signal of the huge potential in open data, and I think through better access to data in general.
Data is a foundational element for our digital economy and an important element in decision-making of all kinds, and so data can really contribute to a number of outcomes.
One is that digital companies can use the data in products and services they are building, which creates economic opportunity for them. Teachers and students in schools, universities, and colleges can use data in educational activities helping to create a skilled workforce. Researchers can access data to improve their findings, and that, at the highest level, just improves our knowledge of the world and can help spark innovations and drive ahead our understanding of the world around us. Businesses can inform their decisions with access to data, helping to secure investment in jobs. Government can make more evidence-based decisions about programs and policies and use the data in its own services, improving results for taxpayers.
In B.C. we're seeing things like this happen in all of those different areas that I mentioned. Open data used by journalists has been driving public debates about liquor policy reform, climate change, and education.
Other good examples are applications created by enthusiasts outside of government. There's an application called SchoolZone that helps parents understand how to get their kids to school in the safest way possible by bringing crash statistics together with school locations and helping people plot their route in accordance.
Other examples include something that the B.C. Ministry of Education has done. It has created a Discover Your School app that helps parents understand the data profile of local schools across the province. I can tell you that was really useful when my wife and I were considering buying a house. I think it was a really great use of government using its own open data to be able to help get better information to the public to help inform their decisions.
But as you would expect, I think we would like to see more things happening, especially around the creation of economic growth through data. Our current thinking is it will be important for us to develop a deeper understanding of our data holdings and wrestle with the question about what data can be of the highest value to our society and to our economy. This is important for us to look at, because as an organization we have limited resources to apply to ensuring our data is of the highest quality, reliability, and accessibility. We need to be able to make good choices, to make sure we can maximize the impact of the open data opportunity for British Columbians and Canadians. That is a challenge for us, because much of our high-value data is something we ask currently people to pay for. Those funds are baked into the business models in many programs, and so it's very difficult for us to change if we want to shift to open data where that data is provided for free.
Moving on to best practices in open data initiatives and inter-jurisdictional collaboration, there are many good practices in the different areas I outlined earlier, around the things that users are looking for.
Looking internationally, I am impressed by the U.K.'s work in this area, in particular, in their investment in growing their data capability. It's clear to me that what they're doing is growing past their focus on numbers of datasets published. They are looking at creating a more holistic vision around data capability that will position the U.K. as a global leader in their ability to analyze, manage, and create value from data. I think that's a really strong and interesting approach. They are connecting the publication of data to the creation of a skilled workforce that can use that data. I think that's a powerful conversation. Her Majesty's government report Seizing the data opportunity, from October 2013, is very interesting, and I would commend it to you.
Other areas of best practice I can see emerging are a result of the collaboration occurring at the pan-Canadian level, at what's called the open data and information working group, which is part of the public sector service delivery council, the Public Sector CIO Council. My federal counterpart at Treasury Board Secretariat and I co-chair this.
At a working level, we're seeing some real advances in approaches to data inventory and cataloguing, a more standard approach to data licensing. There are a lot of good practices emerging about improving the search of data catalogues. All of these things are related to the findability of data, which as I said, is really fundamental to the whole endeavour.
As part of this, we think data standards created around high-value datasets will also be a very important area of work. In British Columbia we're watching, with great interest, the Canadian Open Data Institute, which was created in the last federal budget. We hope that it can be active in all of these different areas.
We're also seeing leaps forward in consuming data from across jurisdictions to create new kinds of digital services more efficiently than ever before. Our team at DataBC recently created what's called a geocoder, which is basically a tool that allows people to find the location of addresses really quickly. If you've ever used Google Maps and fired an address in there and then you see a point on a map, that's the result of a geocoder being able to relate an address to a latitude and longitude on a map. In B.C., we've recently created one.
This service was created more quickly with a higher level of accuracy than many other geocoders available out there because it was consuming open data from local governments and municipalities, so consuming their address data to create results. The efficiency gain from not having to negotiate with other governments, to be able to access that data, to simply be able to consume it, was a real leap forward in our productivity.
For ourselves, an emerging area of real interest is the idea of promoting data literacy. Our teams run events with schools and help young people learn to work with data, particular with geospatial data. It's really fabulous and exciting to be able to see young people engaged in using these things, and it's really great to be in classrooms and watching a next generation build some skills that we think are going to be critical for the next number of years.
B.C. was an early leader in open data at the provincial level. We got started in July 2011. And I think it's exciting to see other jurisdictions moving forward and leaping ahead of us in many ways—Ontario, Quebec, Newfoundland, and Alberta in particular. I'm looking forward to learning more about what our colleagues in New Brunswick are doing.
