:
Thank you very much to the committee for having me. It's a great chance, actually, to be of service today, so I hope my remarks to you are helpful.
In my day job, I'm a public servant with the British Columbia public service, as the chair mentioned. My focus there is on citizen engagement in policy development and service improvement. But I would like to make clear to the committee that while my remarks are certainly shaped by that experience, today I am on my own time. I took some vacation to come out, and I'm speaking for myself, so the views expressed here are my own and do not reflect the views of British Columbia.
With that disclaimer, let me briefly lay out what I'd like to cover today.
First is why open government matters, not just as a democratic principle but as a strategy of public management; an example of how open strategies, based on open government approaches, can help solve public problems in new ways; the importance of thinking beyond provision of data and information to working to engage people with data and information; and a short word about the requirements of political leadership around open government.
One thing we need to recognize is that the skills of governing in the 21st century are very different from those needed in the 20th century. We face two significant and basically unavoidable problems in government in Canada, as does the rest of the world: we are mostly broke, and our demographics dictate that our public sector workforce is likely to be shrinking dramatically very soon. So if we have little money and very few people, how are we going to get good things done for the country?
My basic answer to that question is that governments will need to learn to collaborate. Whereas before they could afford to be top down—“we think it, we decide it, we do it” kinds of organizations—today governments find themselves grappling with highly complex issues that they cannot solve alone. Challenges such as poverty and climate change cannot be legislated out of existence; nor can healthy communities and safe streets simply be created, as much as we want them. Instead, these problems require coordinated and collaborative action from many actors, including individuals, for us to make progress.
This theme has lately been taken up by political leadership in the U.S. and the U.K. One version of this theme is President Obama's campaign tagline, “Yes we can”. Another version has come from Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom, who said during the launch of his campaign:
We can deal with our debts. We can mend our broken society. We can restore faith in our shattered political system. But only if millions of people are fired up and inspired to play a part in [their]...future.
Taken in this context, open government, and particularly open data, becomes more than a discussion about transparency and democracy. It can be seen as a strategy to empower the public to collaborate with government and with one another to understand and accomplish goals. It's about effectiveness as much as it is about principle.
I recognize that this is a broad statement, and some folks may think it's a bit of a wild claim, but my recent experience demonstrates that such an approach is possible.
A project that I was involved with in my work in B.C., called Apps for Climate Action, was a contest for web and software developers to take freely available government data and apply their ingenuity to creating web and mobile applications that help people understand and deal with the impacts of climate change. The contest produced 16 qualified entries, some of which I would say were frankly brilliant. And the contest helped B.C.'s Climate Action Secretariat make the most of new technology, create media interest, and reach out to a whole new demographic of people to inspire them to get busy around taking action on climate.
The important thing I want to point out is that while it was coordinated by the provincial government, the contest was sponsored by businesses and not-for-profits that had an interest in open data and climate action. The $40,000 in cash and prizes that we raised for the contest entrants came from sponsors. We also received “in kind” contributions from sponsors. For example, the contest website was developed by a small web company based in Vancouver, contest entrants had access to usability experts from a Vancouver firm to help make their apps more user-friendly, the Vancouver Aquarium hosted the awards ceremony, and David Eaves, who spoke to you earlier this week, also donated his time and advice.
We made the sponsorships work not by doing a classic procurement whereby government commissions specific solutions to specific problems. Instead, B.C. issued an opportunity notice that described the problem we were trying to solve, signalled the kinds of resources we were looking for to help us, and then invited those who were interested in helping us achieve the goal to apply. Basically, we were open to working with anyone who wanted to work with us, and the response was really excellent and significant. Really, what we wound up with were groups that were passionate about climate action and were prepared to meaningfully commit their resources, with us at the province, to help create a great contest.
As I hope is clear, the result of being open—this is connecting back to open government—to other ideas and resources meant the provincial government could accomplish far more than it ever could accomplish on its own.
There have been a series of open, data-based apps contests around the world, and they have their strengths and weaknesses. Many have been far better structured and have enjoyed more success than the one I was involved with. I commend Apps for Ottawa and Apps for Edmonton, which were two recent contests in Canada, as examples of how open data can be used to engage the public. Those were both, I think, wild successes.
But for me the lesson of the contest was how effective data-driven collaboration can be and how many resources are out there for governments to leverage, provided they know how to ask.
I spent a lot of time at public events promoting the contest, showing people data, brainstorming with programmers and non-programmers, looking for patterns that could spark a prize-winning idea. The conversations with members of the public were amazing. There was passion, positivity, focus, creativity, and analysis. There was a true creative ethos, and participants were looking to themselves to take the next steps on the part of the problem that meant the most to them. They weren't waiting for government to offer solutions; they were looking to create and implement their own. It was an awesome citizenship, let me tell you, and there is a lot of it out there.
This brings me to the gap that I see in many open government strategies, particularly around open data. It's not enough to simply publish data or information. Work needs to be done to focus people on it, build community around ideas and analysis, see how it applies to real problems, and set the norms of responsible use of this valuable public resource. Otherwise, the data may not meet its full potential.
In my view, this is the new definition and challenge of public policy work for public servants: to find ways to benefit from the insight and expertise of those outside government's walls prepared to work on it together in a shared agenda, because, returning to the theme of demographics and finances, we're going to need those people in the very near future.
We're seeing early signals of this approach internationally. The U.S., for example, has appointed what's called an open data evangelist to reach out to communities, schools, educational institutions, and others. It is building partnerships with educational institutions to build more capacity for data literacy in the United States.
New Zealand is integrating open data into its public consultations, particularly around technical subjects, to encourage a common basis of analysis for those who provide submissions.
While I can't authoritatively say how well these experiments are working, I do know that they are important. Should you recommend open data to the government, I believe you should also recommend that resources to encourage engagement with the public come along with it.
Since this is a political venue, I want to say one quick thing about the importance of matching open government and political leadership in Canada. I'm hopeful that our leaders, you, begin to see the power and possibilities of using mechanisms of open government to collaborate more deeply with the public; that instead of simply offering solutions to win votes, political leaders can see how effective and necessary asking the right questions is to bring the right people together so that lasting solutions to the big problems that challenge us—health care, climate change, to name two—can be meaningfully addressed.
This means that our leaders challenge groups and individuals to take responsibility for problems and commit their own resources to solving them. It also means that all concerned are accountable for delivering their piece of the puzzle. Government has a part, but isn't necessarily on the hook for delivering the whole.
Open government, and in particular open data, offers a way of working towards this possibility because of the collaborative capacity it creates. Open data can become a platform for collaboration between government and the public, and I hope we as a country can seize it.
As the committee continues its work, I'm looking forward to seeing how you draw on the remarkable reservoir of Canadian expertise in thinking about governance and public engagement. Many of the ideas you've heard from me are inspired by people like Don Lenihan of the Public Policy Forum and Thomas Homer-Dixon of the University of Waterloo. I brought a list of other folks whom I can refer you to if you're interested, and we can get into the conversation.
In particular I would like to recommend colleagues in British Columbia to speak to you about British Columbia's Government 2.0 plan, which includes references to open data and open information. In particular, the deputy minister of the Ministry of Citizens' Services, Kim Henderson, and Allan Seckel, the head of the British Columbia public service, would be excellent spokespeople for the provincial government's direction in this area.
With that, I'll thank you very much. I'd like to conclude my remarks.
:
Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity for speaking with you today. I'm very much looking forward to the discussion this afternoon.
I believe you received the brief that I sent forward, so I'm just going to centre on some select slides to emphasize the messaging and to actually build on what David has been talking about.
I think the key thing, from a municipal perspective, is that as the government closest to the people, we're in a lot of interactions with them, and we're seeing a lot of requirements and demands for opening up government, for making it more transparent, and basically for being able to track how we're doing from a performance perspective and making sure they have a voice in their local government. I believe that's potentially across all governments. We're seeing that right across Canada, around the world, as David was saying, and also right up through to the federal government in terms of some of our discussions, such as with Natural Resources Canada and some other very forward-thinking areas.
What we believe in our space is that in this local government, where we're the closest to the people, we're starting to see this very large transformation happen, and it's starting to gain momentum.
I'm going to select a few slides here to focus in on some of the work we've done and to hopefully put some information out there to get you to ask some questions and drill in further.
I'm partnering with my city clerk, Ulli Watkiss, who is the information lead in our city--as in most municipalities--and we're looking at it from both an information management and an IT perspective. We also work with the divisions who are the program deliverers.
In terms of the presentation material I have for you, the introduction introduces some of the challenges and some of the reasons why there's this new culture of open government that we see, open government as the default, which is really “that's the starting point” and we go from there.
I'd like to direct you to page 4, where you see the concept of “Toronto at your Service”. This is when Mayor Rob Ford, who was recently elected, came to power. He came to the first council meeting and laid out four specific priorities. The first one was to improve customer service, the second to make city hall more transparent and more accountable, the third to reduce the size of government and the cost of government, and the fourth to improve transportation.
Well, even the last one can benefit from open data. In fact, all of them can be done, improving customer service and efficiencies, because, again, the data is out there, everything from better scheduling from the TTC, when the next bus is coming—and we've had apps built on that data—right through to better customer online services to participating in enabled e-government. In all ways, open government and open data are enhancing what the mayor is aiming at in terms of priorities.
The next slides talk a little about some of the growth in this area and the number of transactions that show the web as an increasingly preferred channel. The telephone still is the top one, but very rapidly the gap is closing so that the web is becoming a very preferred channel. That's also indicating that 98% of Canadians have some type of Internet access, which means, again, that open data online can be very accessible.
I want to define open government and open data because I think there are so many different definitions. And it was included in your package, but I want to emphasize that it's more than just the data. It's this concept of open interaction and engagement, and civic engagement, and getting people to make deputations and being involved, whether it's online or in person, and then sharing that experience with others and benefiting from leveraging the unique decision-making capability of that wider space.
I think that's really important, because at the end of the day, what we see at the local level is that open government and open data increase the trust in government, and confidence, in particular in their most local government and the one they have the most dealings with. But we think in all governments that's the case.
On the next page you'll see that we have a system called the Toronto meeting management information system. Now this is a really important system, because if you go, and the link is there, you can see that everything about the city government is online—all the agendas, all of the reports, everything is there—and also the data about it. I think there are links in here that you can explore that with.
One of the elements about this in our strategy is the basis of both proactive and routine disclosure. Proactive is where we put the data or the information online, and routine disclosure is where we can quickly get the information there in terms of a normal request. This has reduced our freedom of information requests by half; therefore, the cost of government goes down, people's responsiveness to the information goes up, and again, trust goes up and improves consultation.
We've also been talking to Dr. Ann Cavoukian, who I believe is either coming or has been here. She talks a lot about privacy by design. Designing it in a system like this ensures that people have access to their government.
We also support it with checklists, information, and advice, both from the city clerks on a policy perspective and from ourselves and IT from a technology perspective.
The next few slides talk about our election system and some of our key developments online, in terms of just shooting through the roof in terms of access to online services.
In slide 11 we talk about the value chain of open data. Open data requires work, but it is work based on what you do every day. It doesn't add to your tasks or add extra resources. We believe it's part of what we do every day. What I mean by that is we have systems there to help us with our professional program delivery. We have information systems there to help with the delivery of government process and to improve the citizen's situation.
We live by three basic principles. We provide data that already exists; we don't go out and create new data just for the sake of opening up data. This is just part of what we do every day, and we put it up on the web. We offer both raw and aggregate data. And most importantly, we put it on a refresh basis and put the metadata or context around it so people know what the data means.
We also need to make sure of the source--that we can actually share it, that the right format is there, and that the proper governance is in place. You can see that we have lots of governance, but that is to make sure the right data is there and it is truly part of our strategic directions.
This value chain has been ongoing since 2009. It has been a very good process and has worked very well. We've had a lot of good response from the community.
On the next page you can see what we launched. I think you've heard of Mark Surman of Mozilla, the Firefox provider. He challenged the City of Toronto in 2008 to think like the web, look to the web, to look to people out there, look for help--government doesn't have to do it all itself--open up “crowdsource” and ask for help to sponsor the development of further uses of open data.
In that light, a community site was developed at the same time we launched this, called datato.org, or data Toronto. This was created by community people on their own time. It also spawned dataott.org, which is data Ottawa. Again, it involved community players putting the demand side, or part of the input, saying, “Here's data we're interested in. What do you think?” We've been working with them on other points of interest to get the data out on the web. That's been very helpful.
The next slide shows you a breakdown of the most popular data sites and downloads. Again, the critical success factors for open data are that it's relevant data, regularly refreshed, and in the proper context. Otherwise you don't know what you're getting. In the earlier uses of open data sites, part of the problem was data getting stale, and people didn't know what the data really stood for.
The other thing we do is open up and work with the Web 2.0 or Gov 2.0 perspective, saying, “What do you think of what we're doing?” We ask through Twitter and different means on our website and processes. We've had lots of different comments, which are included. Some of the feeds from Twitter are there.
We've also seen some great results. There are some application examples included in the slide presentation. One of the most interesting ones was around someone who created an iPhone app, so when you're walking to the bus stop you already know when your bus is going to get there. That's pretty exciting. There are other ones, like DineSafe, to make sure the restaurant you're going to is good.
The other side of it, just like in Ottawa, is 311. We have the largest in Canada and the second-largest in North America. With 311 you think of the telephone, but it also has a lot of self-service features now on the web. We're opening up the knowledge we capture and advice we give out to citizens. We put that up online so you can self-service that. We're also going to be putting up the request data very soon on our open data site.
We had over a million calls in the first year, and it just keeps building in popularity. It's a great connector out to the populace, as it is here in Ottawa.
You'll see in the presentation, again on the next slide, some of the feeds that come in, because through Twitter they also track how things are going.
The other thing I'd like to focus on--and again, the next few slides show some of what our web is doing--is next-generation open data. Just putting open data up there in raw form, in machine readable form, is very helpful. As David was saying, there are contests and different ways you can get developers to develop new and interesting applications, but not everyone is a developer. Not everyone has the capabilities to develop applications, or perhaps even wants to, but everyone does want to know about their city or their government and what's going on.
There is something now called a data blog. That means you have a variety of different data types, and if you want to look at a spreadsheet or a visualization of data or raw data that you want to download and develop an application with, those would all be available on the website. New York City has done this, and we're looking to do this for our 311. I know it's a little bit unclear on the slide there, but there are different examples there about visualization. We also want to get our budget data up there with a navigator, because budget data is some of the most complex data. We've actually been working with the open community through a “hackathon”, which happened in December, through which people are building a navigator application so they can actually work through our budget data. That's going to get budget data out to the public more quickly, which is going to help in the debate around our rapidly changing budget situation.
With the next slide, I want to just finish up with what I mean by a transformation journey. This takes time, but it isn't a sequence of events. It's many things happening at different maturity levels at the same time. It's really understanding the citizens' needs, working with them, understanding, keeping the pulse on them, bringing the government close, anytime, anywhere, to people, and ensuring that you're continually listening and building their confidence by offering out more and more about the government through open data and open government.
You've heard from Chris Moore, I believe, and I believe Guy Michaud is coming. We've also been working with Vancouver through something called G4. If you're interested, we can share the recent report. The cover is shown in your presentation there. It's fairly deep, but it has a lot of good information. If you're interested, we can certainly share that with you. The key recommendations are noted on the slide speaking notes there, and these really focus in on what different municipalities can do in opening up their data even more. We believe there are some common areas of focus, such as licensing formats and sharing our experiences.
To conclude my speaking points, I will say that change will just continue to happen. Certainly it's happening in the City of Toronto, and I know it's happening here in Ottawa and at the provincial governments too. The challenges are not going to stop. They're going to continue to evolve. We believe by working through new thinking and by reaching out and working with the public itself and other levels of government within these important frameworks, we can make government better and more open and in fact more responsive.
Thank you very much. Those are my remarks.
What has come to be known as “open government”--the enhanced availability of data to the public through electronic means--will hopefully allow anyone interested in a subject area to be able to do better research, provide better input to public consultations, and improve their representations to government as a result.
This is a good thing, but it is not the only thing. And it does not mean that bringing in electronic open government will bring about a truly open government.
I've set out three ways that government information becomes public. I'll just skip through them quickly.
Because most, if not all, records now exist in electronic form, much more government information should be available on government websites. The access to information review task force report in 2001 set out a number of recommendations for improvement for the release of information. Recently a number of governments have gone down this road. The U.S., the U.K., Australia, and a number of sub-national governments, many of them municipalities, have undertaken this challenge.
There is no insurmountable challenge preventing the Government of Canada from moving forward with a similar initiative. Information Commissioner Legault has outlined several manageable concerns, some of which are common to open data schemes everywhere. Others, like the requirement of translation to meet official language requirements, legal and constitutional, are particular to this country and especially to the federal government.
In B.C., our Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act has been subject to three different committee reviews--there's a five-year review of the act--and each of the committees has recommended more routine release, more use of electronic data, and more routine disclosure by government. We have yet to see it.
The second method is access to information requests. If routine disclosure is the push from government out to its citizens and to the rest of us, access to information provides us, as citizens, with the ability to pull information from government. It's a complete code for making access requests. It also provides a process of review. It's a vital link in the chain of citizens’ ability to find out what their governments are doing, and it provides a balance between the rights of citizens to information and the legitimate requirements for confidentiality in certain clearly defined, limited circumstances. However, it was not intended as, nor should it be, the primary method of release. The primary method of release should be routine disclosure.
We won't go into the many deficiencies of the ATI system. This committee has gone through that. I will spare you a recap of it. We will come back to it, though, because the ATI system is vital for any true system of open government.
Finally, there's unauthorized unrequested release, which is basically what happens when there's no system, or it breaks down. It's leaks. WikiLeaks is an example. This is another way that information sometimes comes out.
In B.C. we also have a section in our act that puts an obligation on heads of public bodies to release information, even without a request, about a risk of significant harm to the environment or to the health or safety of the public or a group of people, or the disclosure of which, for any other reason, is clearly in the public interest.
I'd also like to take you through some potential pitfalls of open government. One is that open government, open data...essentially becomes electronic brochures. Government puts these up now, and what we have.... The risk is that government will just push favoured content out onto the web, that it will not be able to be manipulated by citizens, that it will not be in a very usable form.
There's probably no way around this. We have to have a certain measure of faith in our public servants and in our government that they will put out information that is...and will not unreasonably restrict the type of information being disseminated. However, that has not been the experience under ATI under different parties, different prime ministers, and different responsible ministers.
Without a way to compel disclosure, there is little reason to believe that the information that is routinely released will be much more than electronic brochures.
The reluctance of governments to allow broad disclosure of information they don’t favour releasing is very well understood, but a current instance in B.C., in which we are directly involved, provides an outstanding example.
We're involved in one of the longest-running FOI requests probably anywhere in this country. We're now into year seven of a contract between IBM and the provincial government. The government has taken us to court a number of times. They have invoked a number of exceptions. The exceptions have all been rejected. They're now off to court again.
Our ultimate point in this is that major government contracts should be readily available online for public scrutiny. The B.C. government has acknowledged the public interest in making contracts available by routinely posting public-private contracts online.
The government has not seen fit to put this contract up, despite the Information and Privacy Commissioner suggesting that this and similar contracts should be put online. The commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, has said, “Proactively releasing these contracts would save everyone considerable time, money and paperwork.”
At the end of the day we may have to put it up ourselves, pending the result of litigation or a change of heart by the government. This should serve as a cautionary example for anybody who thinks that open data is something that will come about easily.
Another potential pitfall is that by becoming entranced with the potential of open data--and there is real potential--we bypass the access to information system and ignore the serious problems it has. The current information commissioner and her predecessors have appeared before you and outlined many of these. This committee has looked at this in the past and made reports attempting to remedy this situation.
It also appears that the amount of information being released is on a downward path. According to the information commissioner, “During the past ten years, the number of cases where all information has been disclosed has decreased from 41% to 16%.”
Much is being made of the idea of putting documents released through ATI online for everyone to see, but there is little point in doing this if requesters are essentially unable to get that information because the system is so dysfunctional.
This leads me to the other question. It is something we have run into in B.C. that we call “trompe l'oeil transparency”. We're currently involved in a complaint involving BC Ferries, which is a government-owned corporation that runs the ferry service in British Columbia. It was put back under the FOI regime late last year as a result of an investigation by the province’s comptroller general, who thought this would be a way of improving governance.
Their policy states that any records released to requesters will immediately be posted on the BC Ferries website. The result is that requesters are deprived of the first use of the information they obtain, which in turn takes away much of requesters’ motivation for investing the time and resources in making FOI requests. To state it plainly, we have here a covert attempt to stifle FOI requests in the guise of the noble aim of allowing greater public access.
If you make it so that the information you get is essentially unusable or you're not able to use it as a reporter or however, there will be fewer and fewer requests that will be posted online.
It's not the first time a public body has tried to do this, but BC Ferries is the first one to make it official policy and to use it to actively discourage requests.
The policy works this way. Requesters are required to go through the normal processes for FOI requests. BC Ferries charges fees to the person requiring the information, to the maximum permissible in every case. Any released records are posted to the BC Ferries website. If information is requested electronically, the requester will receive it at the same time it is posted. If sent in hard copy, the records will be posted within 24 hours of their being mailed to the requester.
We have direct experience with this. We had stuff sent to us. We got it three days after it went up.
I'm just going to move it along here. I'd like to conclude by saying that FIPA's view is that we have to ensure that overdue moves toward routine release and the use of technology to make government information more widely available must also make this information usable for all Canadians.
Canadians must also have the ability to request specific information from their government and to receive that information in a reasonable time at no or minimal cost. This means creating a functional system for access to information.
No one wants to head toward a dystopia where governments push out electronically information that no one uses or trusts, while occasional dumps of WikiLeaks-type documents raise the issue of serious damage to legitimate state, business, or personal interests.
We hope that your work on open government will be a big step toward bringing about real openness in government.
Thank you.
I want to thank our witnesses for being here today. This has certainly been an engaging topic we've embarked on. I think there's pretty wide agreement that we need to move ahead with this as quickly as possible, but your input has certainly been valuable.
I want to focus most of my questions toward Mr. Wallace.
I certainly appreciate the summary you've given us here. Just working through some of the different apps that you've highlighted, whether it's restaurant inspection reports, transportation schedules, or even the visualization, I certainly see a lot of value in that. But I want to come back to page 6 of your presentation, primarily, where you focus on and use the term “open government”. I think many of our witnesses have tried to help us understand there's a difference between open data and open government. You make a number of statements here that I'd just like to follow up on.
You say that open government is not just offering data sets on the web; it's much more than that. You talk about civic engagement and so on. Further down on that page, you talk about the full record of council and committee decisions being posted during the meetings. I'm wondering if you would have an idea as to how many people are actually tracking the meeting while it's going on.
In the final paragraph, you say that public participation in the decision-making process is increasing--and that has to be our end goal, public participation--and that the number of deputations at council has increased from 2,000 in 2007 to more than 4,100 in 2010.
My question sort of follows up on what Mr. Siksay was getting at in terms of the number of deputations: 4,100. Obviously, most of those were online, and possibly some of them were delegations appearing before council; I don't know if you would have numbers on that. How do you handle that volume?
Subsequent to that, how can we be sure that those deputations that are arriving...? First of all, are they read? Secondly, if they're read, are they absorbed? Is there any potential for action on them? Is there a staff member or multiple staff members assigned to deal with those things? There are a lot of questions surrounding that. Are we increasing expectations unrealistically and possibly shortchanging the process somewhere along the line?
I hope you can follow my line of thinking there.
:
Yes, I think I understand it. Let me know if I don't answer your question.
I don't think there's anything ever wrong with opening up the doors wider.
Mr. Harold Albrecht: Right.
Mr. David Wallace: The fact is that at the municipal level there are many people who come and do deputations. They get five minutes and they make their point. They've been doing that since town hall meetings, and now, in the electronic age, we're engaging them through this meeting management system where they can put it through on e-mail. In the future, we're going to have perhaps even web chats, and who knows.
We have, in our clerk's area, ways of looking at the types of input coming in: what are the themes of the input, what are the areas of concern? There are many input elements, but there are many like areas of focus. One of the visualization techniques is that as you get and receive the information in, you can start to see what the patterns are and where the interest areas are. Then you can engage the public and drill further down and say, “Let's explore that topic. Let's talk about it. Perhaps we can have a focus session on that topic.”
So what happens is that you get this much more two-way street. In the old days, you would come and say your peace. You'd say thank you very much, and it would be recorded. You'd take some element from it, I'm sure, because you'd get a sense of the feeling out there, but you'd never really get a sense of what exactly it meant to the larger issues.
If you can now start to get to where you can see the patterns and work with that, especially in an electronic way, then you can start to work intelligently with all that input. What knowledge-based systems can allow you to do--technology can help us here--is they can look for those patterns and point out, say, a couple of injunction points that perhaps the standing committee on planning and growth, or on economics or environment, really needs to explore further; maybe we need to look at some of the things that were in our capital plan, even though we're in the middle of the year, and say, “Wait a minute. Do we have the right investments or do we need to make some changes?” So you get a better pulse from citizens.
Now, at the federal level it's very challenging--you have a country to work with--but that's where your partners at the other levels of government can help. They can funnel up some of the issues. A good example is people who don't have identity. How do we give them benefits? How do we provide proper care to them? How does that work when the federal level says you must have identity to have a bank account, and yet you have challenges? So we're working on that problem, but we're working with our provincial level and our federal level to determine how we make sure that we can equally engage these people who don't really have a voice today.
So this is how we work with that. I think one of the most exciting things is that when you see that in 2007, the page views on the website in this area were zero, and now we have--
:
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 apply through a proper process and be fully validated and so on, but that type of information—our utilities information, what's under the pavement—is not exposed on the open data perspective.
There is another type of information that most American cities are starting to think about putting up there and it's called crime data. In fact if you go to New York, you can actually see who is being accused and all kinds of stuff. From a privacy perspective, that is something we have worked through, and our civic engagement group has worked with the police. That's just not doable, and it's something that, from a Canadian perspective, is not acceptable.
What we do, though, is create what we call neighbourhood indicators, and they're based on various factors and different characteristics. You can get a reading in a neighbourhood of what's going on there, not just in terms of crime but other elements, economics and so on. It gives you, in a forum with all the information around it, what the experience is and what's happening, but the raw, detailed information that is in the police files and so on stays exactly there.
We've taken a tremendous amount of precautions. Once we were challenged in 2008 to do it, we took a year to prepare and really go through the details with our clerks, with our civic engagement, talking with the police, the community people, and so on, to really prepare and understand how we could do this. We also looked at examples that were out there.
Most information that's open is GIS information or maps, and that's because people want to know where something is. But it's also the easiest information to get out there. That's why you see the explosion on Google Maps and so on. But that only goes so far. People want to know what the characteristics are and what's really going on in their neighbourhood, and that's where these neighbourhood wellness indicators and other elements are helpful.
But they don't disclose public safety issues. On H1N1, all of the clinic information was up there, but obviously the health results and what was going on wasn't. So we work with our chief medical officer and all the different divisions and agencies to make sure, and they are the ones who pull the switch. They do the quality checklists. They're the ones who release the data. They get advice from clerks. They get advice from the information professionals. They talk to IT on the technical aspects, but they're the ones who say, “That data is ready to go.”
That's why, through that very detailed and ongoing consultation, what is up there is right and it has the proper metadata, and we know it's serving the public in all the possible ways, along with making the government itself more transparent, but in a proper way, in a way that is fulfilling our obligation to the citizens.
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I'll try to go through it very briefly.
Our initial reaction was cautiously optimistic when we heard they were going to be putting requests up online because this is a good thing. The CAIRS system existed federally, and that, as I noted in my written brief, should be replaced. But as more and more details became available, it became increasingly obvious that the system was designed not so much to increase transparency as to really make things difficult for certain requesters.
We've started to see more and more information. BC Ferries does not just put the information up on the website. They also issue a news release telling other news media that, “The Vancouver Sun has just got this information. The province, the CBC, CTV, everybody else, you have it. Go to our website, and you'll have the same stuff they spent months going after.”
They also still charge fees. They charge a lot of fees. We're just beginning some battles over fees.
So if you're the requester, you're having to jump through the hoops; you're having to pay money maybe; and at the end of the day, you don't get an extra minute to look at it.
The other thing is that, as FOI requests were coming out--because, of course, we immediately filed one on how they designed their system--one of the memos we found in the document dump, which they put up online and which we got three days later in paper form, said that officials of BC Ferries were looking at how they could proactively release some of the information that they knew they were going to be asked for.They could see the question about how much money the CEO of BC Ferries was making this year coming, but for whatever reason, there were a number of memos in which the people designing the website were saying, “So are we getting the content on this or what?” And then it mysteriously petered out. We may get that later after maybe another court case.
Clearly officials thought about this. They were looking at transparency. They were looking at proactive release, but with the system that's actually in place, you don't get that. You have to file a request. Officials have to go and approach the chair to try to find out what he made this year, instead of just putting it up, putting up his expenses, things like that.