Category Archives: public service sector renewal

Joining the Canadian Government's Advisory Panel on Open Government

Some people have already noticed, so wanted to share the news here as well. Yesterday, the Canadian Government announced the Advisory Panel on Open Government to which I was asked to join.

The purpose of the panel is to serve as a challenge function to the government as it develops its ideas and policies. I see my role as that of pushing the government on where I believe they could be doing more. Obviously, I’ve always been interested in peoples thoughts, hopes and concerns around Open Government (and many of you have been keen to share them with me), my hope is that this will provide another way to inject these ideas into the government’s planning process.

As I make suggestions and recommendations I will attempt to blog about them here, there were, indeed, a number of suggestions I made yesterday during the first Advisory Panel’s meeting, and I hope to write up as I think they will be helpful to other governments as well.

For those curious about who else is on the panel, it is chaired by Minister Clement and I’m joined by a number of other excellent “outside of government” voices (full list of names and bios here as well). In the list below I’ve tried to include twitter handles wherever possible:

Bernard Courtois, Past President & CEO, Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC)

Robert Herjavec, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, The Herjavec Group

Alexander B. Howard, Government 2.0 Correspondent, O’Reilly Media

Thomas ‘Tom’ Jenkins, Head of the Canadian Digital Media Network and Executive Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer, OpenText Corporation

Vivek Kundra, Executive Vice President of Emerging Markets, Salesforce.com.

Herb Lainchbury, Chief Technology Officer, MD Databank Corp.

Colin McKay, Public Policy Manager (Canada), Google

Toby Mendel, Executive Director, Centre for Law and Democracy

Alex Miller, President and Founder, ESRI Canada

Marie-Lucie Morin, Executive Director for Canada, Ireland and the Caribbean, The World Bank

Dr. Rufus Pollock, Co-Founder and Director, Open Knowledge Foundation

Dr. Teresa Scassa, Vice-Dean of Research and Professor of Law, University of Ottawa

As an off topic aside, the first meeting too place using Cisco’s telepresence technology. This essentially is fancy videoconferencing where all the rooms around are virtually identical so that it feels like people are sitting around the same table. It was the first time I’ve tried using it and I was duly impressed. It did mean that the government didn’t have to fly us in from all around the world to meet face to face – a real cost savings and obviously, good for emissions as well.

Inferring Serial Killers with Data: A Lesson from Vancouver

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For those happily not in the know, my home town of Vancouver was afflicted with a serial killer during the 80’s and 90’s who largely targeted marginalized women in the downtown eastside – the city’s (and one of the country’s) poorest neighborhoods.

The murderer – Robert Pickton – was ultimately caught in February 2002 and, in December 2007, was convicted on 6 accounts of second degree murder. He is accused of murdering an additional twenty women, and may be responsible for deaths of a number more.

Presently there is an inquiry going on in Vancouver regarding the failure of the policy to investigate and act earlier on the disappearing women. Up until now, the most dramatic part of the inquiry for me had been heart wrenching testimony from one female officer whose own efforts within the Police Department went largely ignored. But I’ve recently seen a new spat of articles that are more interesting and disturbing.

It turns out that during the late 1990s the Vancouver Policy Department actually had an expert analyzing crime data – particularly regarding the disappearing women – and his assessment was that a serial murder was at work in the city. The expert, Kim Rossmo, advised the police to issue a press release and begin to treat the case more seriously.

He was ignored.

The story is relatively short, but worth the read – it can be found here.

What’s particularly discouraging is looking back at past articles, such as this Canadian Press piece which was published in June 26th, 2001, less than a year before Pickton was caught:

Earlier that day, Hughes stood with six others outside a Vancouver courthouse and told passers-by she believes a serial killer is responsible.

Vancouver police officially reject the suggestion.

But former police officer Kim Rossmo supported it while he was a senior officer. He wanted to warn residents about the possible threat. Rossmo is now involved in a wrongful dismissal trial against the force in B.C. Supreme Court.

Last week, he testified he wanted to issue a public warning in 1998, but other officers strongly objected. The force issued a news release saying police did not believe a serial killer was behind the disappearances.

Indeed, Rossom was not just ignored, other policemen on the force actively made his life difficult. He was harassed and further data that would have helped him engage in his analysis was withheld from him. Of course a few months later the murder was caught, demonstrating that his capture might have happened much earlier, if the force had taken the potential problem seriously.

A few lessons from this:

1) Data matters. In this case, the use of data could have, literally, saved lives. Rossom’s data model is now used by other forces and has become a professor in the United States.

2) The challenge with data is as often cultural as it is technical. As with the Moneyball story, the early advocates of using data to analyze and reassess a problem are often victimized. Their approach threatens entrenched interests and, the work often is conducted by people on the margins. Rossom was the first PhD in Canada to become a police officer – I’m pretty sure that didn’t make him a popular guy. Moreover, his approach implicitly, and then explicitly suggested the police were wrong. Police forces don’t deal with errors well – but nor do many organizations or bureaucracies.

3) Finally, this case study says volumes about police forces capacity to deal with data. Indeed, some of you may remember that the other week I deconstructed the Vancouver Police Department’s misleading press release regarding its support for Bill-C30 which would dramatically increase the police’s power to monitor Canadians online. I find it ironic that the police are seeking access to more data, when they have been unable to effectively use data that they can already legal acquire (or that, frankly is open, such as the number and locations of murder/disappearance victims).

More on Google Transit and how it is Reshaping a Public Service

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Some of you know I’ve written a fair bit on Google transit and how it is reshaping public transit – this blog post in particular comes to mind. For more reading I encourage you to check out the Xconomy article Google Transit: How (and Why) the Search Giant is Remapping Public Transportation as it provides a lot of good details as to what is going on in this space.

Two things about this article:

First, it really is a story about how the secret sauce for success is combining open data with a common standard across jurisdictions. The fact that the General Transit Feed Specification (a structured way of sharing transit schedules) is used by over 400 transit authorities around the world has helped spur a ton of other innovations.

Couple of money quotes include this one about the initial reluctance of some authorities to share their data for free (I’m looking at you Translink board):

“I have watched transit agencies try to monetize schedules for years and nobody has been successful,” he says. “Markets like the MTA and the D.C. Metro fought sharing this data for a very long time, and it seems to me that there was a lot of fallout from that with their riders. This is not our data to hoard—that’s my bottom line.”

and this one about iBart, an app that uses the GTFS to power an app for planning transit trips:

in its home city, San Francisco, the startup’s app continues to win more users: about 3 percent of all trips taken on BART begin with a query on iBART

3%? That is amazing. Last year my home town of Vancouver’s transit authority, Translink, had 211.3 million trips. If the iBart app were ported to here and enjoyed similar success that would man 6.4 million trips planned on iBart (or iTranslink?). That’s a lot of trips made easier to plan.

The second thing I encourage you to think about…

Where else could this model be recreated? What’s the data set, where is the demand from the public, and what is the company or organization that can fulfill the role of google to give it scale. I’d love to hear thoughts.

Transparency isn't a cost – it's a cost saver (a note for Governments and Drummond)

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Yesterday Don Drummond – a leading economist hired by the Ontario government to review how the province delivers services in the face of declining economic growth and rising deficits – published his report.

There is much to commend, it lays out stark truths that frankly, many citizens already know, but that government was too afraid to say aloud. It is a report that, frankly, I think many provincial and state governments may look at with great interest since the challenges faced by Ontario are faced by governments across North America (and Europe).

From an IT perspective – particular one where I believe open innovation could play a powerfully transformative role – I found the report lacking. I say this with enormous trepidation, as I believe Drummond to be a man of supreme intellect, but my sense is he (and/or his team) have profoundly misunderstand government transparency and why it should be relevant. In Chapter 16 (no I have not yet read all 700 pages) a few pieces come together to create, what I believe, are problematic conditions. The first relates to the framing around “accountability”:

Accountability is an essential aspect of government operations, but we often treat that goal as an absolute good. Taxpayers expect excellent public-sector management as well as open and transparent procurement practices. However, an exclusive focus on rigorous financial reporting and compliance as the measure of successful management requires significant investments of time, energy and resources. At some point, this investment is subject to diminishing returns.

Remember the context. This section largely deals with how government services – and in particular the IT aspects of these services – could be consolidated (a process that rarely yields the breadth of savings people believe it will). Through this lens the interesting things about the word “accountability” in this section above is that I could replace it with searchability – the capacity to locate pieces of information. I agree with Drummond that there is a granularity around recording items – say tracking every receipt versus offering per diems – that creates unnecessary costs. Nor to I believe we should pay unlimited costs for transparency – just for the sake of transparency. But I do believe that government needs a much, much stronger capacity to search and locate pieces of information. Indeed, I think that capacity, the ability for government to mine its own data intelligently, will be critical. Transparency thus becomes one of the few metrics citizens have into not only how effective a government’s inputs are, but how effective its systems are.

Case in point. If you required every Canadian under the age of 30 to conduct an ATIP request tomorrow, I predict that you’d have a massive collapse in Canadians confidence in government. The length of ATIP requests (and the fact that in many places, they aren’t even online) probably says less about government secrecy to these Canadians than it does about the government’s capacity to locate, identify and process its own data and information. When you can’t get information to me in a timely manner, it strongly suggests that managers may not be able to get timely information either.

If Ontario’s public service is going to be transformed – especially if it is going to fulfill other Drummond report recommendations, such as:

Further steps should be taken to advance partnering with municipal and federal services —efficiencies can be found by working collaboratively with other levels of government. For example, ServiceOntario in Ottawa co-locates with the City of Ottawa and Service Canada to provide services from one location, therefore improving the client experience. Additionally, the new BizPal account (which allows Ontario businesses to manage multiple government requirements from a single account) allows 127 Ontario municipalities (such as Kingston, Timmins, Brampton and Sudbury) to partner with ServiceOntario and become more efficient in issuing business permits and licensing. The creation of more such hubs, with their critical mass, would make it easier to provide services in both official languages. Such synergies in service delivery will improve customer experience and capitalize on economies of scale.

Then it is going to require systems that can be easily queried as well as interface with other systems quickly. Architecting systems in open standards, that can be easily searched and recoded, will be essential. This is particularly true if the recommendation that private sector partners (who love proprietary data models, standards and systems which regularly trap governments in expensive traps) are to be used more frequently. All this is to say, we shouldn’t to transparency for transparencies sake. We should do transparency because it will make Ontario more interoperable, will lower costs, and will enable more accountability.

Accountability doesn’t have to be a cost drive. Quite the opposite, transparency should and can be the bi-product of good procurement strategies, interoperable architecture choices and effective processes.

Let’s not pit transparency against cost savings. Very often, it’s a false dichotomy.

Two Reasons I love blogging: Helping out great communities

Requests for Endorsements: My Application to Attend The Open Government Partnership

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Dear friends,

Below (first in english then in a rough french translation – my spoken is much better than my written so I’ve relied on Google translate) is my application letter to attend the April 16-18 Annual Open Government Partnership meeting in Brasilia as a Civil Society Representative.

The first reason I’m posting this is in an effort to make my application as transparent as possible. By posting it, if people have comments, additions, questions,I thought it might be helpful to post it. I can’t promise to engage every issue – I know some people have disagreed with positions I have taken – but I will do my best to engage what I believe is a broad community that cares about everything from open data, to access to information requests, to simply having more accessible MPs and websites.

Another – connected – reason I’m posting my application is I need your help. As part of the process I’m asked to submit organizations that endorse my application. For those of you who already have expressed this support… thank you. I will definitely add you to this letter. If you are willing to support my application and have not yet let me know, please do send me an email (or comment below). I need to add you organization (if any), your name and your email address.

The application deadline is February 6th (yes, it would have been better to get this up sooner) so ideally any feedback would be great to get today or this weekend. That said, I would still love to get feedback after the 6th in case I do go, I’d still like to be able to listen for and act on what you care about.

If you have other questions about or suggestions for the application, please let me know. Thank you!

Dear Open Government Partnership,

I am writing to express my desire to participate as a local civil society member at the 2012 OGP meeting in Brazil.

I have been active in Open Government for the past 7 years working as an advocate, adviser and chronicler of transparency in Canada and around the world.

Background and Engagement in OGP Issues

As an advocate, I’ve spoken about the challenges around Open Government across Canada at the municipal, provincial and federal levels. Internationally, I’ve given the opening keynote at the last two International Open Government Data Camps hosted by the Open Knowledge Foundation, was invited to address the 7^th International Conference of Information Commissioners in Ottawa and Mexico’s Semana Nacional de la Transparencia, and given talks at the Gov 2.0 Expo and Summit in Washington DC (at which the host, Tim O’Reilly, stated, “If you read only one blog in the Gov 2.0 space, you should read eaves.ca”).

In addition to speaking, I’ve tried to actively demonstrate ways open government can improve our communities. My belief is that we need a broad set of ways to engage citizens in open government – some will be motivated by accountability, but others will be engaged by simply having their lives made easier. Consequently, in pursuit of advancing accountability, I worked with a team of developers sponsored by Microsoft to create Emitter.ca, a website that mashes up pollution, politician, and company data to enable citizens to identify heavy polluters in their neighborhoods and region. While trying to find ways to show how open government can promote better services, I worked with friends to create Recollect.net, a simple service that uses open data to remind citizens to take out their recycling and garbage. And as an advocate, when the Federal Government lagged by years behind the US and the UK in creating an open data portal, I created http://www.datadotgc.ca which sought to track open data sets already being shared on various ministry website to demonstrate that, contrary to its position, the government already had a policy infrastructure to do open data. This site helped pressure the government into launching its own formal open data website.

I’ve also worked actively in the Open Government space by engaging with governments directly. In 2009, I co-drafted the open motion for the Mayor and Council of the City of Vancouver. This lead to the first city council motion in the world directing city staff to make open data part of their activities. As a result, Vancouver launched the world’s second municipal open data portal (after Washington DC). I also worked with the city’s IT staff to revise procurement rules to make open data a required specification as well make open source software a permissible option. At the federal level, I worked with NGO and educated key government players to shift Canada – which had been skeptical – into agreeing to participate in the OGP.

I have, however, also been critical when necessary. I’ve written pieces in newspapers and on my blog when governments have failed to be transparent or have taken steps in the wrong direction.

Meeting Contribution and Learnings

The Open Government Partnership provides civil society members with a rare carrot and stick for engaging their government on the issue of open government. Because it requires the government to set clear goals around transparency in an international forum, it provides civil society with leverage to hold the government to account.

While this leverage must be handled responsibly (factually incorrect critiques will erode the public’s confidence in civil society organizations), if properly used it can compel the government to move more aggressively on fixing problems in this area. This is of particular urgency in Canada, where government transparency has been in decline over the past several decades. Once considered cutting age, Canada’s access to information regime is wildly out of date. Access to information requests are handled more slowly than ever and access to government information – with the exception of a dramatic improvement in the area of open data – is becoming more restrictive. My goal at the Open Government Partnership will be to engage other government and NGOs to understand the transparency benchmarks being set by other governments that can be used as a way by which Canadians can judge the progress of their own government. I can also share my own experiences in moving open data policies through local and national governments, as well as some approaches for engaging non-traditional stakeholders in this space.

OGP Outreach Plan

Upon returning from the Open Government Partnership, I commit to aggregating feedback from various actors in an effort to have it directly inform the goals and actions of the Canadian Federal Government with whom I have a critical but cordial relationship. I will also, of course, blog about what I believe are the key benchmarks Canadian civil society actors should be using to pressure and measure the Canadian government against. Finally, I commit to get on the phone with any civil society actor that contacts me and discuss with them what I observed and how I believe it impacts their organization.

Funding

With regard to funding, my hope is that I will be able to find some alternative funding for travel. As a result, I’m looking to have my room and board covered along with some of my travel costs. My hope is that by doing so, it might be possible to use some of the OGP funds to support the travel of others.

The organizations, names and emails of the leaders endorsing my application

Organisation Leader Email

Thank you for considering my application. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

David Eaves

version française

Cher Partenariat gouvernement ouvert,

Je vous écris pour exprimer mon désir de participer en tant que membre de la société civile locale à la réunion de 2012 du OGP au Brésil.

J’ai été actif au sein du gouvernement ouvert pour les 7 dernières années de travail comme un défenseur, de conseiller et chroniqueur de la transparence au Canada et partout dans le monde.

Contexte et engagement dans les questions du OGP

En tant que défenseur, j’ai parlé des défis autour de la transparence du gouvernement partout au Canada aux niveaux municipal, provincial et fédéral. Au niveau international, je vous ai donné le discours d’ouverture lors des deux dernières International Open Camps de données hébergées par le gouvernement de l’Open Knowledge Foundation, a été invité à s’adresser à la 7e Conférence internationale des commissaires à l’information à Ottawa et du Mexique Semana Nacional de la Transparencia, et donné des conférences au l’Gov 2.0 Expo et au Sommet de Washington DC (à laquelle l’hôte, Tim O’Reilly, a déclaré: «Si vous ne voulez lire un blog dans l’espace Gov 2.0, vous devriez lire eaves.ca”).

En plus de parler, j’ai essayé de démontrer activement des façons un gouvernement ouvert pouvons améliorer nos collectivités. Ma conviction est que nous devons un large éventail de moyens pour engager les citoyens dans un gouvernement ouvert, dont certains seront motivés par la reddition de comptes, mais d’autres seront engagés en ayant simplement leur vie plus facile. Par conséquent, dans la poursuite de l’avancement de responsabilité, j’ai travaillé avec une équipe de développeurs parrainés par Microsoft pour créer Emitter.ca, un site Web qui écrase les données de la pollution, homme politique et la société pour permettre aux citoyens d’identifier les pollueurs dans leurs quartiers et de la région. Tout en essayant de trouver des façons de montrer le degré d’ouverture du gouvernement peut favoriser de meilleurs services, j’ai travaillé avec des amis pour créer Recollect.net, un service simple qui utilise les données ouvertes à rappeler aux citoyens de prendre leur recyclage et des ordures. Et en tant que défenseur, lorsque le gouvernement fédéral retardée par des années derrière les Etats-Unis et au Royaume-Uni dans la création d’un portail de données ouverte, j’ai créé http://www.datadotgc.ca qui a cherché à suivre les données ouvertes fixe d’ores et déjà partagé sur le site Web du ministère, pour montrer que, contrairement à sa position, le gouvernement avait déjà une infrastructure politique de faire de données ouvertes. Ce site a contribué pression sur le gouvernement en lançant son propre site web officiel de données ouvert.

J’ai aussi travaillé activement dans l’espace ouvert par gouvernement collaboration avec les gouvernements directement. En 2009, j’ai co-rédigé la motion ouverte pour le maire et le conseil de la ville de Vancouver. Cela a conduit à la motion du Conseil municipal première dans le monde de diriger le personnel municipal pour faire partie des données ouverte de leurs activités. En conséquence, Vancouver a lancé seconde municipale dans le monde Portail de données ouvertes (après Washington DC). J’ai également travaillé avec TI de la Ville de personnel pour réviser les règles de passation des marchés pour rendre les données ouvertes une spécification requise ainsi rendre les logiciels open source d’une option acceptable. Au niveau fédéral, j’ai travaillé avec des ONG et instruits joueurs clés du gouvernement de transférer au Canada – qui avait été sceptique – en acceptant de participer à l’OGP.

J’ai, cependant, a également joué un rôle crucial lorsque cela est nécessaire. J’ai écrit des pièces dans les journaux et sur mon blog où les gouvernements n’ont pas réussi à être transparents ou ont pris des mesures dans la mauvaise direction.

Comment vais-je contribuer à la réunion et ce, je veux apprendre de fréquenter;

Le Partenariat sur la transparence gouvernementale offre aux membres de la société civile avec une carotte et du bâton rare pour engager leur gouvernement sur la question d’un gouvernement ouvert. Parce qu’il oblige le gouvernement à fixer des objectifs clairs à la transparence dans un forum international, il offre à la société civile avec effet de levier pour obliger le gouvernement à rendre compte.

Bien que cet effet de levier doit être géré de façon responsable (dans les faits critiques incorrectes va éroder la confiance du public dans les organisations de la société civile), si elle est correctement utilisée, elle peut contraindre le gouvernement à agir de façon plus agressive sur la résolution des problèmes dans ce domaine. Ceci est d’une urgence particulière au Canada, où la transparence du gouvernement a été en déclin au cours des dernières décennies. Autrefois considéré comme la coupe d’âge, l’accès du Canada au système d’information est follement hors de date. Demandes d’accès à l’information sont traitées plus lentement que jamais et l’accès à l’information du gouvernement – à l’exception d’une amélioration spectaculaire dans la zone de données ouvertes – est de plus en plus restrictive. Mon objectif au sein du Partenariat sur la transparence gouvernementale sera d’engager les autres gouvernements et les ONG pour comprendre les repères de transparence étant fixés par les gouvernements d’autres qui peuvent être utilisés comme un moyen par lequel les Canadiens peuvent juger l’état d’avancement de leur propre gouvernement. Je peux aussi partager mes propres expériences dans le déplacement des politiques d’ouverture des données par les gouvernements locaux et nationaux, ainsi que quelques approches pour engager les acteurs non traditionnels dans cet espace.

Description de mon OGP plan de sensibilisation avec la société civile et d’autres où je rentre chez moi

Au retour de la société en commandite gouvernement ouvert, je m’engage à agréger les commentaires des différents acteurs dans un effort pour faire informer directement les objectifs et les actions du gouvernement fédéral canadien avec qui j’ai une relation critique, mais cordiale. Je vais aussi, bien sûr, blog sur ce que je crois sont les principaux critères canadiens acteurs de la société civile devraient être en utilisant à la pression et de mesurer le gouvernement canadien contre. Enfin, je m’engage à prendre le téléphone avec n’importe quel acteur de la société civile qui communique avec moi et discuter avec eux ce que j’ai observé et comment je crois que son impact sur leur organisation.

Financement

En ce qui concerne le financement, mon espoir est que je serai en mesure de trouver un financement alternatif pour les voyages. En conséquence, je suis à la recherche d’avoir ma chambre et pension comprise avec certains de mes frais de déplacement. Mon espoir est que, ce faisant, il pourrait être possible d’utiliser une partie des fonds du OGP à financer les déplacements des autres.

Les organisations, les noms et les courriels des dirigeants approuvant ma demande

Organisation Leader Courriel

Merci de considérer ma demande. S’il vous plaît laissez-moi savoir si vous avez des questions.

Sincèrement,

David Eaves

Adapting KUALI financials for cities: Marin County is looking for Partners

Public Servants Self-Organizing for Efficiency (and sanity) – Collaborative Management Day

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Most of the time, when I engage with or speak to federal public servants, they are among the most eager to find ways to work around the bureaucracy in which they find themselves. They want to make stuff happen, and ideally, to make it happen right and more quickly. This is particularly true of younger public servants and those below middle management in general (I also find it is often the case of those at the senior levels, who often can’t pierce the fog of middle management to see what is actually happening).

I’m sure this dynamic is not new. In large bureaucracies around the world the self-organizing capacity of public servants have forever been in a low level guerrilla conflict against the hierarchies that both protect but also restrain them. What makes all this more interesting today however, is never before have public servants had more independent capacity to self-organize and never before have the tools at their disposal been more powerful.

So, for those who live in work in Ottawa who’d like to learn some of the tools public servants are using to better network and get work done across groups and ministries, let me point you to “Collaborative Management Day 2012.” (For those of us who aren’t public servants, that link, which directs into GCPEDIA won’t work – but I’m confident it will work for insiders). To be clear, it’s the ideas that are batted around at events like this that I believe will shape how the government will work in the coming decades. Much like the boomers created the public service of today in the 1960’s, millennials are starting to figure out how to remake it in a world of networks, and diminished resources.

Good luck guys. We are counting on you.

Details:

When: Wednesday, January 25, 2012 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Where: Canada Aviation and Space Museum, 11 Aviation Parkway, Ottawa, ON or via Webcast

Cost: Free! Seats are limited; registration is required for attendance.

The GCPedia community defines collaboration as being “a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals—for example, an intellectual endeavour that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus.” And this is exactly what the Collaborative Culture Camp (GOC3) will teach you to achieve at the next Collaborative Management Day on January 25, 2012.

This free event will offer you a day of workshops and learning sessions that will help you:

Expand your knowledge and use of collaborative tools and culture

Develop an awareness of alternative processes that deliver results

Understand how to foster an environment of openness and transparency

Develop networks to support the application of new tools

At the end of the day you will be able to bring a collaborative toolkit back to your organization to share with your employees and colleagues!

Keep up to date on the event by keeping an eye on our GCPedia pages and by following us on Twitter (@GOC_3) and watching the #goc3 conversation (no account needed to check out the conversation!).

Questions? Concerns? Feedback? Feel free to email the event organizers or leave a message on our Discussion page on GCPedia.

StatsCan's free data costs $2M – a rant

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So the other day a reader sent me an email pointing me to a story in iPolitics titled “StatsCan anticipates $2M loss from move to open data” and asked me what I thought.

Frustrated, was my response.

$2M is not a lot of money. Not in a federal budget of almost $200B. And, the number may have been less. The StatsCan person quoted in the article called this expected loss of revenue a “maximum net loss.” This may mean that the loss from making the data free does not take into account the fact the StatsCan’s expenditures may also go down. For instance, if StatsCan no longer has to handle as many financial transactions or chase down invoices and so forth, the reduction if staff over other overhead (unrelated to its core mission by the way) and so result in lower operating costs not reflected in the $2M cited above.

Moreover it is still unclear to me where the $2M figure comes from. As I noted in a blog post earlier this year, in StatsCan’s own reports it outlined that its online database (the one just made free) generated $559,000 in revenue (not profit) in 2007-08 and was estimated to generate $525,000 in revenue in 2010-11. Where does the extra $1.5M come from? I’m open to the fact that I’m reading these reports incorrectly… but it is hard to see how.

But all this is really an aside.

What really, really, really, frustrates me is that the hard number of $2M. It is a pittance.

This is the unbearable cost that’s been holding up open StatsCan data for years? This may be the tiniest golden goose ever killed. Maybe more like a lame duck. Can anyone believe the loss of $2M (or 500K) was going to break the organization?

Give me a break.

What a colossal lack of imagination and sense of economic and social prosperity on the part of every government since Mulroney (who made StatsCan engage in cost recovery). In the United States open statistical data has helped businesses, the social sector, local and state governments, as well as researchers and academics. Heck, even Canadian teachers tell me that they’ve been forced to train students on US data because they couldn’t afford to train their students on Canadian data. All this lost innovation, efficiency, jobs and social benefits for a measly $2M dollars (if that). Oh lack of vision, at all levels! Both at the top of the political order, and within StatsCan, which has been reluctant to go down this route for years.

Now that we see the “cost” this battle seems more pathetic than ever.

Sigh. Rant over.

Statistics Canada Data to become OpenData – Background, Winners and Next Steps

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As some of you learned last night, Embassy Magazine broke the story that all of Statistics Canada’s online data will not only be made free, but released under the Government of Canada’s Open Data License Agreement (updated and reviewed earlier this week) that allows for commercial re-use.

This decision has been in the works for months, and while it does not appear to have been formally announced, Embassy Magazine does appear to have managed to get a Statistics Canada spokesperson to confirm it is true. I have a few thoughts about this story: Some background, who wins from this decision, and most importantly, some hope for what it will, and won’t lead to next.

Background

In the embassy article, the spokesperson claimed this decision had been in the works for years, something that is probably technically true. Such a decision – or something akin to it – has likely been contemplated a number of times. And there have been a number of trials and projects that have allowed for some data to be made accessible albeit under fairly restrictive licenses.

But it is less clear that the culture of open data has arrived at StatsCan, and less clear to me that this decision was internally driven. I’ve met many a Statscan employee who encountered enormous resistance while advocating for data open. I remember pressing the issue during a talk at one of the department’s middle managers conference in November of 2008 and seeing half the room nod vigorously in agreement, while the other half crossed it arms in strong disapproval.

Consequently, with the federal government increasingly interested in open data, coupled with a desire to have a good news story coming out of statscan after last summer census debacle, and with many decisions in Ottawa happening centrally, I suspect this decision occurred outside the department. This does not diminish its positive impact, but it does mean that a number of the next steps, many of which will require StatsCan to adapt its role, may not happen as quickly as some will hope, as the organization may take some time to come to terms with the new reality and the culture shift it will entail.

This may be compounded by the fact that there may be tougher news on the horizon for StatsCan. With every department required to have submitted proposal to cut their budgets by either 5% and 10%, and with StatsCan having already seen a number of its programs cut, there may be fewer resources in the organization to take advantage of the opportunity making its data open creates, or even just adjust to what has happened.

Winners (briefly)

The winners from this decision are of course, consumers of statscan’s data. Indirectly, this includes all of us, since provincial and local governments are big consumers of statscan data and so now – assuming it is structured in such a manner – they will have easier (and cheaper) access to it. This is also true of large companies and non-profits which have used statscan data to locate stores, target services and generally allocate resources more efficiently. The opportunity now opens for smaller players to also benefit.

Indeed, this is the real hope. That a whole new category of winners emerges. That the barrier to use for software developers, entrepreneurs, students, academics, smaller companies and non-profits will be lowered in a manner that will enable a larger community to make use of the data and therefor create economic or social goods.

Such a community, however, will take time to evolve, and will benefit from support.

And finally, I think StatsCan is a winner. This decision brings it more profoundly into the digital age. It opens up new possibilities and, frankly, pushes a culture change that I believe is long over due. I suspect times are tough at StatsCan – although not as a result of this decision – this decision creates room to rethink how the department works and thinks.

Next Steps

The first thing everybody will be waiting for is to see exactly what data gets shared, in what structure and to what detail. Indeed this question arose a number of times on twitter with people posting tweets such as “Cool. This is all sorts of awesome. Are geo boundary files included too, like Census Tracts and postcodes?” We shall see. My hope is yes and I think the odds are good. But I could be wrong, at which point all this could turn into the most over hyped data story of the year. (Which actually matters now that data analysts are one of the fastest growing categories of jobs in North America).

Second, open data creates an opportunity for a new and more relevant role for StatsCan to a broader set of Canadians. Someone from StatsCan should talk to the data group at the World Bank around their transformation after they launched their open data portal (I’d be happy to make the introduction). That data portal now accounts for a significant portion of all the Bank’s web traffic, and the group is going through a dramatic transformation, realizing they are no longer curators of data for bank staff and a small elite group of clients around the world but curators of economic data for the world. I’m told a new, while the change has not been easy, a broader set of users have brought a new sense of purpose and identity. The same could be true of StatsCan. Rather than just an organization that serves the government of Canada and a select groups of clients, StatsCan could become the curators of data for all Canadians. This is a much more ambitious, but I’d argue more democratized and important goal.

And it is here that I hope other next steps will unfold. In the United States, (which has had free census data for as long as anyone I talked to can remember) whenever new data is released the census bureau runs workshops around the country, educating people on how to use and work with its data. StatsCan and a number of other partners already do some of this, but my hope is that there will be much, much more of it. We need a society that is significantly more data literate, and StatsCan along with the universities, colleges and schools could have a powerful role in cultivating this. Tracey Lauriault over at the DataLibre blog has been a fantastic advocate of such an approach.

I also hope that StatsCan will take its role as data curator for the country very seriously and think of new ways that its products can foster economic and social development. Offering APIs into its data sets would be a logical next step, something that would allow developers to embed census data right into their applications and ensure the data was always up to date. No one is expecting this to happen right away, but it was another question that arose on twitter after the story broke, so one can see that new types of users will be interested in new, and more efficient ways, of accessing the data.

But I think most importantly, the next step will need to come from us citizens. This announcement marks a major change in how StatsCan works. We need to be supportive, particularly at a time of budget cuts. While we are grateful for open data, it would be a shame if the institution that makes it all possible was reduced to a shell of its former self. Good quality data – and analysis to inform public policy – is essential to a modern economy, society, and government. Now that we will have free access to what our tax dollars have already paid for, let’s make sure that it stays that way, by both ensure it continues to be available, and that there continues to be a quality institution capable of collecting and analyzing it.

(sorry for typos – it’s 4am, will revise in the morning)