Government Operations committee  Yes, it's a bit more broad than open data. It's basically a crowd-sourcing challenge site. I think, like many jurisdictions that are interested in finding a cheaper, more efficient way to do things, maybe we'll start looking at that down the road as well.

Government Operations committee  No, there is no crowd-sourcing platform for the Government of Canada.

Government Operations committee  Currently, the plan for the directive is to be issued later this summer.

Government Operations committee  There are a variety of activities that we can undertake to promote the existence of the open data portal, even the existence of our partner portals within other jurisdictions. The minister talked about the most successful promotional activity to date, which was CODE. This brought profile to data.gc.ca that we had not seen before, and the impact has been immediate in terms of awareness of this site in general.

Government Operations committee  There are a few. It is a draft directive at this point and it has not been approved, so I'll be speaking to draft requirements. As Corinne Charette mentioned, the primary requirement is that first we will have to know what data exists comprehensively across the government. Departments will be required to complete data inventories—

Government Operations committee  There are a few more. All departments will be required to publish all data that is not subject to privacy, confidentiality, conflict of interest.

Government Operations committee  It's a good point. The policy will be applied to schedule 1 and 2 organizations, not crown corporations.

Government Operations committee  I was, yes.

Government Operations committee  Certainly it's a really good point. One of the witnesses, David Eaves, I think, talked pretty significantly about this when he was here. It's important to be able to associate the benefits of open data far beyond just what the economic impact might be in the first place, the social impact specifically.

Government Operations committee  It was an interesting event. It was the first one we'd ever done. As the minister said, the response was overwhelming and unexpected to us. The feeling of entrepreneurial pursuit was rampant right across the event. There were a lot of teams there, thinking about how to build the next application, how to get a new tool available on iPhones, at 99¢ a shot.

Government Operations committee  One of the most interesting and sort of revolutionary parts of open data going forward with our colleagues in the U.S. and the U.K. is around new technologies that allow for the anonymization of data. I can say without hesitation that there's no personal data of any kind in any of the data sets that have been made available.

Government Operations committee  Within the government, we define personal data very specifically. It's a long list. None of those data elements can be contained in any of the data sets that we currently make available.

Government Operations committee  Yes, that's public information so that one is not really a concern. I think if you're talking about Canadian citizen client information being included in individual data sets, the reality is that right now because privacy is such a paramount concern to us, we have to be exhaustive about working with the departments to ensure that no aspect of personal data is contained so that it cannot be correlated with any other data set.

Government Operations committee  There really are. The charter specifically listed a large appendix of very precise data sets that each individual member state has agreed to provide by the end of the two-year period. We all, as well, have to provide an update at the end of 2014 on how we're doing with those. In terms of us, as Corinne mentioned, and the U.S. and the U.K., the bulk of these data sets are already available.

Government Operations committee  Procurement data was one of the areas defined.