Information & Ethics committee  I'd like to thank you also for the opportunity to come today. I have enjoyed the discussion. The main point I'd like to leave you with, again, builds on the comment Vincent is speaking to, which is that opening up government is a two-way street. Look at the processes, simplify t

Information & Ethics committee  We have developed a toolset, what we call a quality checklist, that the divisions have and go through. It gets very clearly down to what is personal information, what can be released, and what cannot. We could supply that to the committee. You could take a look at it, and if you

Information & Ethics committee  If I could just add to that, one of the things—and it's noted, actually, on the slide a little bit earlier than that—is around who's voting on what. That is becoming a very important thing. Now, if you're a member of Parliament, what they're voting on, that would be pretty easy

Information & Ethics committee  In our process, if we receive it through an e-mail, we don't put the result of that detailed FOI request up online. It goes back to the originator. When we're talking about open data and all that, these are the proactive disclosure, routine disclosure elements, or specific FOI re

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, there actually are a lot of precautions built in. That's a very good point. For example, linear inventory is not provided. You can't see how many kilometres of piping or electrical or any of that information, which is never going to be allowed online. An engineer could app

Information & Ethics committee  Again, that's in the clerk's area. There's a group devoted to corporate information management service that also deals with records management and freedom of information requests. So there is a budget for the people who work there. That information is available online, but I will

Information & Ethics committee  At 311 we receive requests in 180 different languages. We have the capability for translation to receive requests for services. Because Toronto is such a multicultural city, we have further challenges than just two languages. We have at least 180 that we're working with, and diff

Information & Ethics committee  We have found that most people have a number of basic purposes for coming to the website. First of all, they have a service that they need to get done, they want to register this, or they want to do this, they want to do that. We tried it through the 301 self-service part of our

Information & Ethics committee  Believe it or not, we use Twitter in a number of ways. We have an Open_TO, a Twitter account where, as we listen to the community, we trial balloon out some ideas and types of data that we're thinking of putting out there and see what people think about that. It's a great way, as

Information & Ethics committee  Yes.

Information & Ethics committee  About 50%.

Information & Ethics committee  That's not that easy to calculate because you're talking about people's time, and so on. One of the things we've discovered.... Our city clerk, Ulli Watkiss, is probably best to answer this because her area deals with it. But from what I know in dealing with these kinds of comple

Information & Ethics committee  There are definite time savings. When you look at a year where you had 4,100 and now you have 2,100 requests—just that amount—there are fewer of these ambiguous requests. Now they are more focused requests, and they're a lot easier and faster to answer. Because people can find

Information & Ethics committee  The entire organization chart and information is there, but we basically invite people through our 311 service to ask any question they want, and they hook up the people through that service. We used to have at least 40 different access points, different phone numbers if you had

Information & Ethics committee  That's right. Instead of remembering that it was Fred I dealt with last time and I'd better go back to Fred to solve my problem, I just go through 311 and I get an answer. It's less to do with specific people and more to do with the service you're getting in terms of our level.