Thank you very much.
Committee members, Mr. Chairman, it is a great honour for us to present the point of view of the City of Montreal on open data.
With me is a senior official from our public service, who will answer questions later on.
Let me start by giving a quick history of the open data policy and open data initiatives at the City of Montreal. We started in 2011 and put in place, first and foremost, an open data policy, and then we went ahead to develop a website to free up the data to the public.
We started gauging the interest of the public in the data we started liberating and freeing up. We noticed that in the early goings, the initiative of the City of Montreal was perceived as a compliancy issue. Everybody was doing it, so we also had to do it, especially because there was a lot of pressure from the bottom up. Now, almost three years after the development of this policy, we recognize that it's not a compliancy issue anymore; it’s a management-transparency issue. In other words, the city has to be transparent towards the citizens; therefore, we will and we do free up data that demonstrates how we use public funds.
Also, we will use the open data policy in order to develop solutions around three key issues we face on a daily basis in the urban environment. The first and foremost issue is transport. All of the future transport systems we are developing have built-in open data mechanisms and they will also have mechanisms for crowdsourced data, equally. It's one thing to have the public administration data, but where you get the synergy is if you join this data with that which comes from the citizens themselves.
The second issue we will concentrate on is sustainable development. There again, we have a lot of data, but we need to share that data—to help university students and help companies add value to that data; to develop policies and solutions to tackle most of the issues we will face in the future.
Last but not least is emergency services. Again, we have some data, but we need data provided to us by the citizens in order to build lasting solutions for this issue. How do we achieve that? On our end, we will tackle the three Ps that I always repeat to our people, to our citizens. First, we are always adapting our policy. Therefore, just like the City of Quebec and the Government of Quebec, we went with the Creative Commons 4.0 licensing. Second, we are reviewing all the processes of the city; therefore, existing systems and new systems have to have built-in open data mechanisms. They have to produce open data.
Finally, the greatest challenge of any public administration is to change the culture of its people. The data we have in our organization belongs to the people who are the different public servants in different services. Therefore, the greatest challenge we have is bringing all these people up to par with our policy decisions because a lot of the services are still very hesitant to free up their data.
On this, I will let Mr. Fortin, follow up with four specific areas where he's going to develop this idea.
Thank you.