Information & Ethics committee  It's not that I want you to believe otherwise, but you could use the taskforce as a model on how to address these issues. In Australia, this group did not consist of only government employees. People like me, officials and industry representatives were invited to participate. They were asked about what they needed, what they wanted to do and what kind of future they envisaged for the Australian government.

Information & Ethics committee  If you want to do an e-consultation, that's great. My only advice to you, if you do an e-consultation, is to make sure that the input of the people you contact gets used in any document you create. The British did a big e-consultation about how to make government better. Hundreds and hundreds of submissions were made.

Information & Ethics committee  I'd love for you to look at the Australian government's Government 2.0 task force, and look at the recommendations they made and the way they tackled the problem. Actually, a fairly short and concise document that makes ten very clear recommendations would be very powerful. One of the things I love about the work you're doing is that a lot of it doesn't actually require the House of Commons to have a big vote or for legislation to change; it can simply be changed if people in authority decide that they want to change it.

Information & Ethics committee  I have a couple of thoughts. First, around open information and the division between the two, I think what the British have done is incredibly interesting. The British are now contemplating setting up a public data corporation that will house the regularly collected data that the government uses.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you so much. I thank the committee for inviting me to come and speak with you today. I want to break down what I'm going to do to be as helpful as possible. I have three big chunks that I think I want to dive into. The first is that I want to just talk a little bit about where I think open government is, what it is, and how we can define it, and try to give the committee a little bit of a framework to help shape their thinking and the recommendations they may make.

Information & Ethics committee  Sorry about that. That's a regular problem with me. I'd like to start by talking about the terms “open government” and “open data”, because I think there's a fair amount of confusion. I have noticed that this committee itself has been using those two terms almost interchangeably, and I think that's actually a mistake.