Government Operations committee  I agree. It takes time, effort, and resources to develop quality data that can be put out there. It's not just about taking data and putting it up on a website. There are a lot of other components to it. It needs to be good quality data that people can use. Ideally, there should be not only data specialists but also, as I said during my comments, people who might have lower levels of expertise with raw data.

Government Operations committee  I have seen glossaries of what the different terminology means when it comes to open data. On the data.gc.ca website there is a list of things, if you want to look up the background of open data. I think, though, there's a divide that's happened. I think the divide exists between government as well as those involved in public administration and those with expertise in the area of data use.

Government Operations committee  No, I don't think—

Government Operations committee  Again, I can't speak for the provinces or the municipalities—

Government Operations committee  —but at the federal level, certainly we haven't had that great of a campaign. The one instance that really pops into my mind where that might have happened in an interesting and good way is the CODE appathon that the Treasury Board Secretariat sponsored to really say to people, here are that data sets we have on our portal, take them, do something interesting with them, and we'll publicize that.

Government Operations committee  I think so. People need to know, in the context of open government in general, and open data as well, as part of open government, that we're doing interesting things as a country. There's room for improvement, but that improvement won't happen unless there's dialogue between different actors and unless citizens are engaged in a meaningful and ongoing way.

Government Operations committee  I have not met with anybody from Treasury Board.

Government Operations committee  I hope that they pay careful attention to the recommendations. They're not, specifically, my own feelings about open government, so they were largely based on what I heard from the majority of stakeholders and things that were supported by documentary analysis as well. I certainly hope they pay attention to that.

Government Operations committee  I'm not sure the open by default policy necessarily will have the greatest effect on open data. The open data initiative is really pushing data sets out there so it would be like, okay, if you have new data sets that are developed, then that information will automatically be made public.

Government Operations committee  I sent a letter. The way the OGP IRM process works is that the national governments get to see a copy of your report prior to it going public. They don't get to veto anything in there but they do get to say, “Hey, there's a factual error or a problem here”. So that process happened and I did get feedback from the Treasury Board Secretariat in response to which I wrote them a letter addressing each of the points that they had made and offering to meet with them to tell them a little bit more about what I had learned and what's going on.

Government Operations committee  That's really difficult. Different jurisdictions have approached it in different ways and I've been looking primarily at the national levels. I think really interesting things are going on at the municipal and provincial levels but most of my research is focused on the national level.

Government Operations committee  I think the geospatial data was already out there. There was already a lot of it. What happened when the data.gc.ca portal went up is that the existing data sets got amalgamated and pushed into that common portal. A lot of the data on some of the areas that you mentioned and that I referred to earlier are data sets that might be seen as a little more sensitive.

Government Operations committee  That I don't know. Treasury Board did say, during the course of the interviews, that there are efforts to expand the data on the portal but I don't know exactly what kind of data.

Government Operations committee  That's a bit of a tricky question, given my position as the independent researcher for the reporting mechanism that is part of the OGP. The independent reporting mechanism tries not to rank countries in terms of who is and who is not doing the best. You can see some reports out there.

Government Operations committee  I can't speak for the cities. My own research has really focused on the federal level, so I'm not quite sure what the municipalities are defining as their data sets. It would be logical that the federal government is the owner of quite larger amounts of data than the municipalities.