Tag Archives: mozilla

Learning from Libraries: The Literacy Challenge of Open Data

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We didn’t build libraries for a literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have public policy literate citizens, we build them so that citizens may become literate in public policy.

Yesterday, in a brilliant article on The Guardian website, Charles Arthur argued that a global flood of government data is being opened up to the public (sadly, not in Canada) and that we are going to need an army of people to make it understandable.

I agree. We need a data-literate citizenry, not just a small elite of hackers and policy wonks. And the best way to cultivate that broad-based literacy is not to release in small or measured quantities, but to flood us with data. To provide thousands of niches that will interest people in learning, playing and working with open data. But more than this we also need to think about cultivating communities where citizens can exchange ideas as well as involve educators to help provide support and increase people’s ability to move up the learning curve.

Interestingly, this is not new territory.  We have a model for how to make this happen – one from which we can draw lessons or foresee problems. What model? Consider a process similar in scale and scope that happened just over a century ago: the library revolution.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, governments and philanthropists across the western world suddenly became obsessed with building libraries – lots of them. Everything from large ones like the New York Main Library to small ones like the thousands of tiny, one-room county libraries that dot the countryside. Big or small, these institutions quickly became treasured and important parts of any city or town. At the core of this project was that literate citizens would be both more productive and more effective citizens.

But like open data, this project was not without controversy. It is worth noting that at the time some people argued libraries were dangerous. Libraries could spread subversive ideas – especially about sexuality and politics – and that giving citizens access to knowledge out of context would render them dangerous to themselves and society at large.  Remember, ideas are a dangerous thing. And libraries are full of them.

Cora McAndrews Moellendick, a Masters of Library Studies student who draws on the work of Geller sums up the challenge beautifully:

…for a period of time, censorship was a key responsibility of the librarian, along with trying to persuade the public that reading was not frivolous or harmful… many were concerned that this money could have been used elsewhere to better serve people. Lord Rodenberry claimed that “reading would destroy independent thinking.” Librarians were also coming under attack because they could not prove that libraries were having any impact on reducing crime, improving happiness, or assisting economic growth, areas of keen importance during this period… (Geller, 1984)

Today when I talk to public servants, think tank leaders and others, most grasp the benefit of “open data” – of having the government sharing the data it collects. A few however, talk about the problem of just handing data over to the public. Some questions whether the activity is “frivolous or harmful.” They ask “what will people do with the data?” “They might misunderstand it” or “They might misuse it.” Ultimately they argue we can only release this data “in context”. Data after all, is a dangerous thing. And governments produce a lot of it.

As in the 19th century, these arguments must not prevail. Indeed, we must do the exact opposite. Charges of “frivolousness” or a desire to ensure data is only released “in context” are code to obstruct or shape data portals to ensure that they only support what public institutions or politicians deem “acceptable”. Again, we need a flood of data, not only because it is good for democracy and government, but because it increases the likelihood of more people taking interest and becoming literate.

It is worth remembering: We didn’t build libraries for an already literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have a data or public policy literate citizenry, we build them so that citizens may become literate in data, visualization, coding and public policy.

This is why coders in cities like Vancouver and Ottawa come together for open data hackathons, to share ideas and skills on how to use and engage with open data.

But smart governments should not only rely on small groups of developers to make use of open data. Forward-looking governments – those that want an engaged citizenry, a 21st-century workforce and a creative, knowledge-based economy in their jurisdiction – will reach out to universities, colleges and schools and encourage them to get their students using, visualizing, writing about and generally engaging with open data. Not only to help others understand its significance, but to foster a sense of empowerment and sense of opportunity among a generation that could create the public policy hacks that will save lives, make public resources more efficient and effective and make communities more livable and fun. The recent paper published by the University of British Columbia students who used open data to analyze graffiti trends in Vancouver is a perfect early example of this phenomenon.

When we think of libraries, we often just think of a building with books.  But 19th century mattered not only because they had books, but because they offered literacy programs, books clubs, and other resources to help citizens become literate and thus, more engaged and productive. Open data catalogs need to learn the same lesson. While they won’t require the same centralized and costly approach as the 19th century, governments that help foster communities around open data, that encourage their school system to use it as a basis for teaching, and then support their citizens’ efforts to write and suggest their own public policy ideas will, I suspect, benefit from happier and more engaged citizens, along with better services and stronger economies.

So what is your government/university/community doing to create its citizen army of open data analysts?

How to Engage with Social Media: An Example

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The other week I wrote a blog post titled Canadian Governments: How to Waste millions online ($30M and Counting) in which I argued that OpenID should be the cornerstone of the government’s online identification system. The post generated a lot of online discussion, much of which was of very high quality and deeply thoughtful. On occasion, comments can enhance and even exceed a post’s initial value, and I’d argue this is one of these cases – something that is always a joy when it happens.

There was however, one comment that struck me as particularly important, not only because it was thoughtful, but because the type of comment is so rare. This is because it came from a government official. In this case, from Dave Nikolejsin, the CIO of the Government of British Columbia.

Everything about Mr. Nikolejsin’s comment deserves to be studied and understood by those in the public and private sector seeking to understand how to engage the public online. His comment is a perfect case of how and why governments should allow public servants to comment on blogs that tackle issues they are themselves addressing.

What makes Mr. Nikolejsin’s comment (which I’ve reprinted below) so effective? Let me break out the key components:

  1. It’s curious: Given the nature of my blog post a respondent could easily have gone on the offensive and merely countered claims they disagreed with. Instead Mr Nikolejsin remains open and curious about the ideas in the post and its claims. This makes readers and other commentators less likely to attack and more likely to engage and seek to understand.
  2. It seeks to return to first principles: The comment is effective because it is concise and it tackles the specific issues raised by the post. But part of what really makes it shine is how it seeks to identify first principles by talking about different approaches to online ID’s. Rather than ending up arguing about solutions, the post engages readers to identify what assumptions they may or may not have in common with one another. This won’t necessarily makes people more likely to agree, but they’ll end up debating the right thing (goals, assumptions) rather than the wrong thing (specific solutions).
  3. It links to further readings: Rather than try to explain everything in his response, the comment instead links to relevant work. This keeps the comment shorter and more readable, while also providing those who care about this issue (like me) with resources to learn more.
  4. It solicits feedback: “I really encourage you to take a look at the education link and tell me what you think.Frequently comments simply retort points in the original post they disagree with. This can reinforce the sense that the two parties are in opposition. Mr. Nikolejsin and I actually agree far more than we disagree: we both want a secure, cost effective, and user friendly online ID management system for government. By asking for feedback he implicitly recognizes this and is asking me to be a partner, not an antagonist.
  5. It is light: One thing about the web is that it is deeply human. Overly formal statements looks canned and cause people to tune out. This comment is intelligent and serious with its content, but remains light and human in its style. I get the sense a human wrote this, not a communications department. People like engaging with humans. They don’t like engaging with communication departments.
  6. Community Feedback: The comment has already sparked a number of responses which contain supportive thoughts, suggestions and questions, including some by those working in municipalities, as experts in the field and citizen users. It’s actually a pretty decent group of people there – the kind a government would want to engage.

In short, this is a comment that sought to engage. And I can tell you, it has been deeply, deeply successful. I know that some of what I wrote might have been difficult to read but after reading Mr. Nikolejsin’s comments, I’m much more likely to bend over backwards to help him out. Isn’t this what any government would want of its citizens?

Now, am I suggesting that governments should respond to every blog post out there? Definitely not. But there were a number of good comments on this post and the readership in terms of who was showing up makes commenting on a post likely worthwhile.

I’ve a number of thoughts on the comment that I hope to post shortly. But first, I wanted to repost the comment, which you can also read in the original post’s thread here.

Dave Nikolejsin <dave.nikolejsin@gov.bc.ca> (unregistered) wrote: Thanks for this post David – I think it’s excellent that this debate is happening, but I do need to set the record straight on what we here in BC are doing (and not doing).

First and foremost, you certainly got my attention with the title of your post! I was reading with interest to see who in Canada was wasting $30M – imagine my surprise when I saw it was me! Since I know that we’ve only spent about 1% of that so far I asked Ian what exactly it was he presented at the MISA conference you mentioned (Ian works for me). While we would certainly like someone to give us $30M, we are not sure where you got the idea we currently have such plans.

That said I would like to tell you what we are up to and really encourage the debate that your post started. I personally think that figuring out how we will get some sort of Identity layer on the Internet is one of the most important (and vexing) issues of our day. First, just to be clear, we have absolutely nothing against OpenID. I think it has a place in the solution set we need, but as others have noted we do have some issues using foreign authentication services to access government services here in BC simply because we have legislation against any personal info related to gov services crossing the border. I do like Jeff’s thinking about whom in Canada can/will issue OpenID’s here. It is worth thinking about a key difference we see emerging between us and the USA. In Canada it seems that Government’s will issue on line identity claims just like we issue the paper/plastic documents we all use to prove our Identities (driver’s licenses, birth certificates, passports, SIN’s, etc.). In the USA it seems that claims will be issued by the private sector (PayPal, Google, Equifax, banks, etc.). I’m not sure why this is, but perhaps it speaks to some combination of culture, role of government, trust, and the debacle that REALID has become.

Another issue I see with OpenID relates to the level of assurance you get with an OpenID. As you will know if you look at the pilots that are underway in US Gov, or look at what you can access with an OpenID right now, they are all pretty safe. In other words “good enough” assurance of who you are is ok, and if someone (either the OpenID site or the relying site) makes a mistake it’s no big deal. For much of what government does this is actually an acceptable level of assurance. We just need a “good enough” sense of who you are, and we need to know it’s the same person who was on the site before. However, we ALSO need to solve the MUCH harder problem of HIGH ASSURANCE on-line transactions. All Government’s want to put very high-value services on-line like allowing people access to their personal health information, their kids report cards, driver’s license renewals, even voting some day, and to do these things we have to REALLY be sure who’s on the other end of the Internet. In order to do that someone (we think government) needs to vouch (on-line) that you are really you. The key to our ability to do so is not technology, or picking one solution over the other, the key is the ID proofing experience that happens BEFORE the tech is applied. It’s worth noting that even the OpenID guys are starting to think about OpenID v.Next (http://self-issued.info/?p=256) because they agree with the assurance level limitation of the current implementation of OpenID. And OpenID v.Next will not be backward compatible with OpenID.

Think about it – why is the Driver’s License the best, most accepted form of ID in the “paper” world. It’s because they have the best ID proofing practices. They bring you to a counter, check your foundation documents (birth cert., Card Card, etc.), take your picture and digitally compare it to all the other pictures in the database to make sure you don’t have another DL under another name, etc. Here in BC we have a similar set of processes (minus the picture) under our Personal BCeID service (https://www.bceid.ca/register/personal/). We are now working on “claims enabling” BCeID and doing all the architecture and standards work necessary to make this work for our services. Take a look at this work here (http://www.cio.gov.bc.ca/cio/idim/index.page?).

I really encourage you to take a look at the education link and tell me what you think. Also, the standards package is getting very strong feedback from vendors and standards groups like the ICF, OIX, OASIS and Kantara folks. This is really early days and we are really trying to make sure we get it right – and spend the minimum by tracking to Internet standards and solutions wherever possible.

Sorry for the long post, but like I said – this is important stuff (at least to me!) Keep the fires burning!

Thanks – Dave.

Saving Millions: Why Cities should Fork the Kuali Foundation

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For those interested in my writing on open source, municipal issues and technology, I want to be blunt: I consider this to be one of the most important posts I’ll write this year.

A few months ago I wrote an article and blog post about “Muniforge,” an idea based on a speech I’d given at a conference in 2009 in which I advocated that cities with common needs should band together and co-develop software to reduce procurement costs and better meet requirements. I continued to believe in the idea, but have recognized that cultural barriers would likely mean it would be difficult to realize.

Last month that all changed. While at Northern Voice I ended up talking to Jens Haeusser an IT strategist at the University of British Columbia and confirmed something I’d long suspected: that some people much smarter than me had already had the same idea and had made it a reality… not among cities but among academic institutions.

The result? The Kuali foundation. “…A growing community of universities, colleges, businesses, and other organizations that have partnered to build and sustain open-source administrative software for higher education, by higher education.”

In other words for the past 5 years over 35 universities in the United States, Canada, Australia and South Africa have been successfully co-developing software.

For cities everywhere interested in controlling spending or reducing costs, this should be an earth shattering revelation – a wake up call – for several reasons:

  • First, a viable working model for muniforge has existed for 5 years and has been a demonstrable success, both in creating high quality software and in saving the participating institutions significant money. Devising a methodology to calculate how much a city could save by co-developing software with an open source license is probably very, very easy.
  • Second, what is also great about universities is that they suffer from many of the challenges of cities. Both have: conservative bureaucracies, limited budgets, and significant legacy systems. In addition, neither have IT as the core competency and both are frequently concerned with licenses, liability and the “owning” intellectual property.
  • Which thirdly, leads to possibly the best part. The Kuali Foundation has already addressed all the critical obstacles to such an endeavour and has developed licensing agreements, policies, decision-making structures, and work flows processes that address necessary for success. Moreover, all of this legal, policy and work infrastructure is itself available to be copied. For free. Right now.
  • Fourth, the Kuali foundation is not a bunch of free-software hippies that depend on the kindness of strangers to patch their software (a stereotype that really must end). Quite the opposite. The Kuali foundation has helped spawn 10 different companies that specialize in implementing and supporting (through SLAs) the software the foundation develops. In other words, the universities have created a group of competing firms dedicated to serving their niche market. Think about that. Rather than deal with vendors who specialize in serving large multinationals and who’ve tweaked their software to (somewhat) work for cities, the foundation has fostered competing service providers (to say it again) within the higher education niche.

As a result, I believe a group of forwarding thinking cities – perhaps starting with those in North America – should fork the Kuali Foundation. That is, they should copy Kuali’s bylaws, it structure, its licenses and pretty much everything else – possibly even the source code for some of its projects – and create a Kuali for cities. Call it Muniforge, or Communiforge or CivicHub or whatever… but create it.

We can radically reduce the costs of software to cities, improve support by creating the right market incentive to help foster companies whose interests are directly aligned with cities and create better software that meets cities unique needs. The question is… will we? All that is required is for CIO’s to being networking and for a few to discover some common needs. One I idea I have immediately is for the City of Nanaimo to apply the Kuali modified Apache license to its council monitoring software package it developed in house, and to upload it to GitHub. That would be a great start – one that could collectively save cities millions.

If you are a city CIO/CTO/Technology Director and are interested in this idea, please check out these links:

The Kuali Foundation homepage

Open Source Collaboration in Higher Education: Guidelines and Report of the Licensing and Policy Framework Summit for Software Sharing in Higher Education by Brad Wheeler and Daniel Greenstein (key architects behind Kuali)

Open Source 2010: Reflections on 2007 by Brad Wheeler (a must read, lots of great tips in here)

Heck, I suggest looking at all of Brad Wheeler’s articles and presentations.

Another overview article on Kuali by University Business

Phillip Ashlock of Open Plans has an overview article of where some cities are heading re open source.

And again, my original article on Muniforge.

If you aren’t already, consider reading the OpenSF blog – these guys are leaders and one way or another will be part of the mix.

Also, if you’re on twitter, consider following Jay Nath and Philip Ashlock.

Canadian Governments: How to waste millions online ($30M and counting)

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Back from DC and Toronto I’m feeling recharged and reinvigorated. The Gov 2.0 expo was fantastic, it was great to meet colleagues from around the world in person. The FCM AGM was equally exciting with a great turnout for our session on Government 2.0 and lots of engagement from the attendees.

So, now that I’m in a good mood, it’s only natural that I’m suddenly burning up about some awesomely poor decisions being made at the provincial level and that may also may be in the process of being made at the federal level.

Last year at the BC Chapter of the Municipal Information Systems Association conference I stumbled, by chance, into a session run by the British Columbia government about a single login system it was creating for government website. So I get that this sounds mundane but check this out: it would means that if you live in BC you’ll have a single login name and password when accessing any provincial government service. Convenient! Better still, the government was telling the municipalities that this system (still in development) could work for their websites too. So only one user name and password to access any government service in BC! It all sounds like $30 million (the number I think they quoted) well spent.

So what could be wrong with this…?

How about the fact that such a system already exists. For free.

Yes, OpenID, is a system that has been created to do just this. It’s free and licensed for use by anyone. Better still, it’s been adopted by a number of small institutions such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, PayPal, and Verisign and… none other than the US government which recently began a pilot adoption of it.

So let me ask you: Do you think the login system designed by the BC government is going to be more, or less secure that that an open source system that enjoys the support of Google, Yahoo, AOL, PayPal, Verisign and the US Government? Moreover, do we think that the security concerns these organizations have regarding their clients and citizens are less strict than those of the BC government?

I suspect not.

But that isn’t going to prevent us from sinking millions into a system that will be less secure and will costs millions more to sustain over the coming decades (since we’ll be the only ones using it… we’ll have to have uniquely trained people to sustain it!).

Of course, it gets worse. While the BC government is designing its own system, rumour has it that the Federal Government is looking into replacing Epass; it’s own aging website login system which, by the by, does not work with Firefox, a web browser used by only a quarter of all Canadians. Of course, I’m willing to bet almost anything that no one is even contemplating using OpenID. Instead, we will sink 10’s of millions of dollars (if not more…) into a system. Of course, what’s $100 million of taxpayer dollars…

Oh, and today’s my birthday! And despite the tone of this post I’m actually in a really good mood and have had a great time with friends, family and loved ones. And where will I be today…? At 30,000 ft flying to Ottawa for GovCamp Canada. Isn’t that appropriate? :)

Mozilla and leadership: Rethinking the CEO

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Last week John Lily – CEO of Mozilla – announced he will be stepping down to take a job at Greylock, a venture capital firm. I’ve only met John twice, and both times he was generous with both his time and willingness to engage some of my thoughts and (many) questions. I know he is a huge asset to Mozilla and has done a great deal to help mature the organization.

With the Mozilla now planning a CEO succession it seems like an opportune time to raise an idea that first came to me a few months ago: Should Mozilla rename the role of CEO?

Why change the title? My interest is that the title communicate the message of Mozilla mission and its method. CEO’s are usually (although, admittedly not exclusively) associated with traditional companies, and to a lesser degree, hierarchical decision making structures. Indeed, if asked what words I were to associate with the CEO I think “authority,” “command” and “hierarchy” would be among the top to jump into my mind.

Mozilla has never been, and I hope never will be, a traditional software company. It is not profit driven but mission driven – its goal is to keep the web open in part by providing a competitive, open standards compliant web-browser. More importantly, the Mozilla models depends not on a large staff to succeed, but on a community of volunteers whose donations of time and code are coordinated by a (relatively) small staff.

So what do I think the core values the titles of Mozilla’s leadership needs to communicate? I think authority and command are definitely part of the mix. Ultimately the senior leadership of Mozilla needs to make difficult strategic and management choices, just like a CEO. But one of the things that I think makes the role so difficult (and different) is that it requires other key attributes as well, including “engagement,” “fun,” and “community.” Let’s face it, if your capacity to create software depends on a volunteer community, that community had better be fun, engaging and with – ideally – low transaction costs.

None of this, I think, is new. Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s chairman and Lily’s predecessor, retains the title she popularly used while in her previous job: Chief Lizard Wrangler (also the name of her blog). That title says it all: Fun, community-oriented, hints at decision-making that is consultative, but still a dose of authority…

So, can we find a new title that reflects these values? I know at Mozilla solutions are prized above observations but I’ll confess I’m a little short on suggestion (I actually love Chief Lizard Wrangler and wonder if that should not be the title). Community Director (as opposed to Executive Director) has come to mind. I’m ultimately not attached to a given solution, I just believe it is important that the title be consistent with the spirit and values of the Mozilla project. I know that the leadership and staff have a lot of its plate and that this is not the most critical issue, but I wanted to put the thought out there nonetheless as symbols such as these matter, I believe especially in mission driven organizations.

Connectedness, Volleyball and Online Communities

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I’m currently knee deep into Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Christakis & Fowler and am thoroughly enjoying it.

One fascinating phenomenon the book explores is how emotions can spread from person to person. In other words, when you are happy you increase the odds your friends will be happy and, interestingly, that your friends’ friends will be happy. Indeed Christakis & Fowler’s research suggests that emotional states are, to a limited degree, contagious.

All this reminded me of playing competitive volleyball. I’ve always felt volleyball is one of the most psychologically difficult games to play. I’ve regularly seen fantastic teams collapse in front of vastly inferior opponents. I used to believe that the unique structure of volleyball accounted for this. The challenge is that the game pauses at the end of every point, allowing players to reflect on what happened and, more importantly, assign blame (which can often be allocated to a single individual on the team). This makes it easy for teams to start blaming a player, over-think a point, or get frustrated with one another.

As a result, even prior to reading Connected, I knew team cohesion was essential in volleyball (and, admittedly, any sport) . This is often why, between points, you’ll see volleyball teams come together and high-five or shake hands even if they lost the point. If emotions and confidence are contagious, I can now see why it is a team starts to lose a little confidence and consequently then plays a little worse causing them to lose still more confidence and then, suddenly they are in a negative rut and can’t escape.(Indeed, this peer reviewed paper showed that tactile touch among NBA players was a predictor of individual and team success)

Of course, I’ve also long believed the same is true of online (and, in particular, open source) communities. That poisonous and difficult people don’t just negatively impact the people they are in direct contact with, but also a broader group of people in the community. Moreover, because communication often takes place in comment threads the negative impact of poisonous people could potentially linger, dragging down the attitude and confidence of everyone else in the community. I’ve often thought that the consequence of negative behaviours in the online communities has been underestimated – Christakis and Fowler’s research suggests there are some more concrete ways to measure this negative impact, and to track it. Negative behaviour fosters (and possibly even attracts) still more negative behaviour, creating a downward loop and likely causing positive or constructive people to opt out, or even never join the community in the first place.

In the end, finding ways to identify, track and mitigating negative behaviour early on – before it becomes contagious – is probably highly important. This is just an issue of having people be positive, it is about creating a productive and effective space, be it in pursuit of an open source software product, or a vibrant and interesting discussion at the end of an online newspaper article.

Datadotgc.ca Launched – the opportunity and challenge

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Today I’m really pleased to announce that we’ve launched datadotgc.ca, a volunteer driven site I’m collaboratively creating with a small group of friends and, I hope, a growing community that, if you are interested, may include you.

As many of you already know I, and many other people, want our governments to open up and share their data, in useful, structured formats that people can actually use or analyze. Unlike our American and British peers, the Canadian Federal (and provincial…) government(s) currently have no official, coordinated effort to release government data.

I think that should change.

So rather than merely complain that we don’t have a data.gov or data.gov.uk in Canada, we decided to create one ourselves. We can model what we want our governments to do and even create limited versions of the service ourselves. So that is what we are doing with this site. A stab at showing our government, and Canada, what a federal open data portal could and should look like – one that I’m hoping people will want to help make a success.

Some two things to share.

First, what’s our goal for the site?

  • Be an innovative platform that demonstrates how government should share data.
  • Create an incentive for government to share more data by showing ministers, public servants and the public which ministries are sharing data, and which are not.
  • Provide a useful service to citizens interested in open data by bringing it all the government data together into one place to both make it easier to find.

Second, our big challenge.

As Luke C, one datadotgc.ca community member said to me – getting the site up is the easier part. The real challenge is building a community of people who will care for it and help make it a living, growing and evolving success. Here there is lots of work still to be done. But if you feel passionate about open government and are interested in joining our community, we’d love to have you. At the moment, especially as we still get infrastructure to support the community in place, we are convening at a google group here.

So what our some of the things I think are a priority in the short term?

  • Adding or bulk scraping in more data sets so the site more accurately displays what is available
  • Locating data sets that are open and ready to be “liberated”
  • Documenting how to add or scrape in a data set to allow people to help more easily
  • Implement a more formal bug and feature tracker
  • Plus lots of other functionality I know I at least (and I’m sure there are lots more ideas out there) would like to add (like “request a closed data set”)

As Clay Shirky once noted about any open source project, datadotgc.ca is powered by love. If people love the site and love what it is trying to accomplish, then we will have a community interested in helping make it a success. I know I love datadotgc.ca – and so my goal is to help you love it too, and to do everything I can to make it as easy as possible for you to make whatever contribution you’d like to make. Creating a great community is the hardest but best part of any project. We are off to a great start, and I hope to maybe see you on the google group.

Finally, just want to thank everyone who has helped so far, including the fine people at Raised Eyebrow Web Studio, Luke Closs, and a number of fantastic coders from the Open Knowledge Foundation. There are also some great people over at the Datadotgc.ca Google Group who have helped scrape data, tested for bugs and been supportive and helpful in so many ways.

Case Study: How Open data saved Canada $3.2 Billion

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Note: I’ll be on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin tonight talking about Government 2.0.

Why does open data matter? Rather than talk in abstract terms, let me share a well documented but little known story about how open data helped expose one of the biggest tax frauds in Canada’s history.

It begins in early 2007 when a colleague was asked by a client to do an analysis of the charitable sector in Toronto. Considering it a simply consulting project, my colleague called the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) and asked for all the 2005 T3010s – the Annual Information Returns where charities disclose to the CRA their charitable receipts and other information – in Toronto. After waiting several weeks and answering a few questions, the CRA passed along the requested information.

After spending time cleaning up the data my colleague eventually had a working excel spreadsheet and began to analyze the charitable sector in the Greater Toronto Area. One afternnon, on a lark, they decided to organize the charities by size of tax-receipted charitable donations.

At this point it is important to understand something about scale. The United Way of Greater Toronto is one of the biggest charities in North America, indeed its most recent annual charitable donation drive was the biggest on the continent. In 2008 – the year of the financial crisis started – the United Way of Greater Toronto raised $107.5 million.

So it was with some surprise that after sorting the charities by 2005 donation amounts my colleague discovered that the United Way was not first on the list. It wasn’t even second.

It was third.

This was an enormous surprise. Somewhere in Toronto, without anyone being aware of it, two charities had raised more money than the United Way (which in 2005 raised target of $96.1M). The larger one, the International Charity Association Network (ICAN) raised $248M in 2005. The other, the Choson Kallah Fund of Toronto had receipts of $120M (up from $6M in 2003).

Indeed, four out the top 15 charities on the list, including Millennium Charitable Foundation, Banyan Tree, were unknown to my colleague, someone who had been active in the Toronto charitable community for over a decade.

All told, my colleague estimated that these illegally operating charities alone sheltered roughly Half a billion dollars in 2005. Indeed, newspapers later confirmed that in 2007, fraudulent donations were closer to a billion dollars a year, with some some 3.2 billion dollars illegally sheltered, a sum that accounts for 12% of all charitable giving in Canada.

Think about this. One billion dollars. A year. That is almost .6% of the Federal Government’s annual budget.

My colleague was eager to make sure that CRA was taking action on these organizations, but it didn’t look that way. The tax frauds were still identified by CRA as qualified charities and were still soliciting donors with the endorsement of government. They knew that a call to CRA’s fraud tip line was unlikely to prompt swift action. The Toronto Star had been doing its own investigations into other instances of charity fraud and had been frustrated by CRA’s slow response.

My colleague took a different route. They gave the information to the leadership of the charitable sector and those organizations as a group took it to the leadership at CRA. From late 2007 right through 2009 the CRA charities division – now under new leadership – has systematically shut down charity tax shelters and are continuing to do so.  One by one, International Charity Association Network, Banyan Tree Foundation, Choson Kallah Fund, the Millennium Charitable Foundation and others identified by my colleague have lost their charitable status. A reported $3.2 billion in tax receipts claimed by 100,000 Canadian tax filers have so far been disallowed or are being questioned. A class action suit launched by thousands of donors against the organizers and law firm of Banyan Tree Foundation was recently certified. It’s a first. Perhaps the CRA was already investigating these cases. It must build its cases carefully as, if they end up in court and fail to successfully present their case, they could help legalize a tax loophole. It may just have been moving cautiously. But perhaps it did not know.

This means that, at best, government data – information that should be made more accessible and open in an unfettered and machine readable format – helped reveal one of the largest tax evasion scandals in the country’s history. But if the CRA was already investigating, scrutiny of this data by the public served a different purpose – helping to bring these issues out into the open, forcing CRA to take public action (suspending these organizations’ right to solicit more donations), sooner rather than later.  Essentially from before 2005-2007 dozens of charities were operating illegally. Had the data about their charitable receipts been available for the public’s routine review,  someone in the public might have taken notice and raised a fuss earlier. Perhaps even a website tracking donations might have been launched. This would have exposed those charities that had abnormally large donations with few programs to explain then. Moreover, it might have given some of the 100,000 Canadians now being audited a tool for evaluating the charities they were giving money to.

In the computer world there is something called Linus’ Law, which states: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs (problems) are shallow.” The same could be said about many public policy or corruption issues. For many data sets, citizens should not have to make a request. Nor should we have to answer questions about why we want the data. It should be downloadable in its entirety. Not trapped behind some unhelpful search engine. When data is made readily available in machine readable formats, more eyes can look at it. This means that someone on the ground, in the community (like, say, Toronto) who knows the sector, is more likely to spot something a public servant in another city might not see because they don’t have the right context or bandwidth. And if that public servant is not allowed to talk about the issue, then they can share this information with their fellow citizens.

This is the power of open data: The power to find problems in complicated environments, and possibly even to prevent them from emerging.

Opening Parliament and other big announcements

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This is going to be an exciting week for online activists seeking to make government more open and engaged.

First off, openparliament.ca launched yesterday. This is a fantastic site with a lot going for it – go check it out (after reading my other updates!). And huge kudos to its creator Michael Mulley. Just another great example of how our democratic institutions can be hacked to better serve our needs – to make them more open, accessible and engaging. There is a ton of stuff that could be built on top of Michael’s and others – like Howdtheyvote, sites. I’ve written more about this in a piece on the Globe’s website titled If You Won’t Tell Us About Our MPs Well Do It For You.

Second, as follow on to the launch of openparliament.ca, I’ve been meaning to share for some time that I’ve been having conversations with the House of Parliament IT staff over the past couple of months. About a month ago parliament IT staff agreed to start sharing the Hansard, MP’s bios, committee calendars and a range of other information via XML (sorry for not sharing this sooner, things have been a little crazy). They informed me that they would start doing this before the year is over – so I suspect it won’t happen in the next couple of months, but will happen at some point in the next 6 months. This is a huge step forward for the house and hopefully not the last (also, there is no movement on the senate as of yet). There are still a ton more ways that information about the proceedings of Canada’s democracy could be made more easily available, but we have some important momentum with great sites like those listed above, and internal recognition to share more data. I’ll be having further conversations with some of the staff over the coming months so will try to update people on progress as I find out.

Finally, I am gearing up to launch datadotgc.ca. This is a project I’ve been working on for quite some time with a number of old and new allies. Sadly, the Canadian government does not have an open data policy and there is no political effort to create a data.gc.ca like that created by the Obama administration (http://www.data.gov/) or of the British Government (http://data.gov.uk/). So, I along with a few friends have decided to create one for them. I’ll have an official post on this tomorrow. Needless to same, I’m excited. We are still looking for people to help us populate the site with open government data sets – and have even located some that we need help scraping – so if you are interested in contributing feel free to join the datadotgc.ca google group and we can get you password access to the site.

Mozilla Drumbeat: Help keep the web open

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Mozilla Drumbeat is the Mozilla Foundations new venture. An effort to reach out beyond those who have helped make the Firefox web browser to a broader community – those that care about keeping the internet open but who want to contribute in other ways.

Drumbeat will have three components:

1) Projects – many of which are already underway

2) Local events – like the upcoming on in Toronto on April 24th

3) A website – that ties it all together, a place where people can gather virtually to organize

So what can you do?

First, if you are interested in hosting a local Mozilla Drumbeat event, contact Nathaniel James at the Mozilla Foundation, there is going to be Facilitator Training event in Toronto on April 23-24th and in Berlin on May 7th-8th.

Second, consider participating in one of the Drumbeat projects listed on the Drumbeat website (still in beta).

I’m looking forward to see Drumbeat evolve and for it to become easier for people to participate in its various projects. Ultimately we need a way to protect the openness of the web – the thing that makes the web so fun and interesting for all us – and Drumbeat is a great starting point.