Tag Archives: public policy

Toronto Innovation Summit on Open Government

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Today I’m at Toronto City Hall doing a panel on Open Government for the Innovation Showcase. If you are reading this before 10am EST you can catch a webcast of the panel at the above link.

I’ve pasted in my slides for those who would like to follow along. Down below I’ve included a few links that those who are new to my site (or who haven’t read my writing on government 2.0) might find interesting.

Open Government: Toronto Innovation Summit

View more presentations from David Eaves.

Some of my favourite posts of open government, open data and gov 2.0:

The Three Laws of Open Government Data

Open Data: USA vs Canada

Create the Open Data Bargain in Cities

Globe and Mail Op-Ed: Don’t Ban Facebook

If I could start with a blank sheet of paper… (written for the Australian Government’s Web 2.0 Taskforce)

Mapping Government 2.0 against the Hype Curve

Feeding the next economy – Give us a stimulus that stimulates, not placates

Why the Government of Canada needs bloggers

Why StatCan could be like Google

The Public Service as Gift Economy

Public Service Sector Renewal and Gen Y: Don’t be efficient

Public Service Sector Renewal: Starting at the APEX

The Stimulus Map: Open Data and enhancing our democracy

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The subject of the distribution of stimulus monies has been generating a fair amount of interest. Indeed, the Globe published this piece and the Halifax Chronicle-Herald published this piece analyzing the spending. But something more interesting is also happening…

Yesterday, my friend Ducky Sherwood and her husband Jim published their own analysis, an important development for two reasons.

First, their analysis is just plain interesting… they’ve got an excellent breakdown of who is receiving what (Ontario is a big winner in absolute and per capita terms, Quebec is the big loser). Moreover, they’ve made the discussion fun and engaging by creating this map. It shows you every stimulus project in the country and where you click it will highlight nearby projects. The map also displays and colour-codes every riding in the country by party (blue for Conservatives, magenta for everyone else) and the colour’s strength correlates to the quantity of monies received.

Stimulus Map

Second, and more interesting for me, is how their analysis hints at the enormous possibilities of what citizens can do when Government’s share their data and information about programs with the public in useful formats. (You can get spreadsheets of the data and for those more technically-minded the API can be found here). This is an example of the Long Tail of Public Policy Analysis in action.

This could have a dramatic impact on public discourse. Open data shifts the locus of power in the debate. Previously, simply getting the data was of value since your analysis would likely only compete, at best, with one or two other peoples (usually a news organization, or maybe a professor). But when anyone can access the information the value shifts. Simply doing an analysis is no longer interesting (since anyone can do it). Now the quality, relevance, ideological slant, assumptions, etc… of the analysis are of paramount value. This has serious implications – implications I believe bode well for debate and democracy in this country. Indeed, I hope more people will play with the stimulus data (like these guys have) and that a more rigorous debate about both where it is being spent and how it is being spent will ensue. (Needless to say, I believe that spending money on auto bailouts and building roads does little to promote recovery – the real opportunity would have been in seeding the country with more data to power the businesses of tomorrow).

There are, however, limits to Ducky’s analysis that are no fault of her own. While she can crunch the numbers and create a great map she is… ultimately… limited to the information that government gives her (and all of us). For example the data set she uses is fairly vague about the value of projects: the government labels them “under $100K” or “between $100K and $1M.” These are hardly precise figures.

Nor does the data say anything about the quality of these projects or their impact. Of course, this is what the debate should be about. Where, how effectively, and to what end is our money being spent? Ducky’s analysis allows us to get to these questions more quickly. The point here is that by opening up this stimulus money to popular analysis we can have a debate about effectiveness.

I don’t, for a second, believe that this will be an easy debate – one in which a “right” answer will magically emerge out of the “data.” Quite the opposite, as I pointed out above the debate will now shift to the economic, ideological and other assumptions that inform each opinion.  This could in fact create a less clear picture – but it will also be a picture that is more reflective of the diversity of opinions found in our country and that can scarcely be represented in the two national newspapers. And this is what is most important. Open data allows for a greater debate, one that more citizens can contribute and be a part of rather than just passively observe from their newspapers and TV screens. That is the real opportunity of open data is not that it enables a perfect discussion, but a wider, more democratic and thus, as far as I’m concerned, a better one.

(An additional note, while it is great that the government has created an API to share this data, let us not get too excited; it is very limited in what it tells us. More data, shared openly would be better still. Don’t expect this anytime soon. Yesterday the Government dropped 4,476 pages off at the Parliamentary Budget Office rather than send them a electronic spreadsheet (h/t Tim Wilson). Clearly they don’t want the PBO to be able to crunch the numbers on the stimulus package – which means they probably don’t want you to either.)

Canada's Arctic Strategy – playing to the strengths of others

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Last week I the good fortune of participating in an intimate workshop on Canadian foreign policy hosted by CIGI and convened in preparation for an upcoming issue of the International Journal in which the papers will be published.

One of the participants, Elizabeth Riddell-Dixon, gave an excellent paper on The United Nations and the Regime to Manage the Continental Shelf Beyond 200 Nautical Miles. During the discussion of her about her paper and Canada’s activities in the North more generally she reiterated the point she made in her September 2008 Policy Options article entitled Canada’s Arctic continental shelf extension: debunking myths:

Contrary to commonly held myths that Canada is losing the race to stake claims to the Arctic continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles as other Arctic countries move more quickly and effectively to secure the resources for themselves, there is no “Wild West” scramble occurring, and relations among the participants are remarkably cooperative. There is an international legal regime in place, and its rules are being observed by the Arctic countries. Furthermore, these states already have sovereign rights over the continental shelf beyond 200 miles that do not depend on occupation or proclamation.

I found Riddell-Dixon’s comments fascinating. Her thorough and convincing assessment sits in stark contrast to the headlines one normally reads in the news: “Battle for the Arctic heats up” (CBC), “Arctic military bases signal new Cold War” (The Times), “Canada uses military might in Arctic scramble” (The Guardian) and “Sweden’s arctic army can beat up our arctic army” (who else… The National Post).

Given these articles one is liable to think that a Russian invasion of The North is imminent! And this is perhaps understandable, talking about military exercises and a “wild west” sells newspapers and makes citizens feel patriotic. It is however, completely divorced from how decisions are presently being made. Indeed, Riddell-Dixon pointed that if anything the activities of Russia, Canada, the United States, Norway and Denmark have been marked by cooperation – we share information, resources and even ships – as we collectively map out the ocean floor. Indeed, this – and other areas of cooperation between the 5 circumpolar countries – was outlined in the (dramatically under-reported) Ilulissat Declaration in which the Arctic Five reaffirmed that:

The five coastal states currently cooperate closely in the Arctic Ocean with each other and with other interested parties. This cooperation includes the collection of scientific data concerning the continental shelf, the protection of the marine environment and other scientific research. We will work to strengthen this cooperation, which is based on mutual trust and transparency, inter alia, through timely exchange of data and analyses.

So we have an international legal regime (based on the Law of the Sea) for resolving boundaries in the North. All the relevant actors are adhering to (and even cooperating around) it. And yet, the military rhetoric around the North continues to get trotted out. If the only consequence was to whip up a sense of nationalism and win votes this would be okay. The problem is that, internationally, this behaviour is irresponsible.

Why? Because language about militarizing The North that implicitly suggests disputes will (or worse, should) be resolved through military strength plays to our weaknesses.

If the North really is going to be resolved through (or influenced by) military might then we will find ourselves clashing with the United States (the world’s lone superpower), Russia (a Great Power) and Denmark and Norway (both of whom can more easily focus their military resources in the North). In a game of military chicken we are, in every scenario, the losers. Ratcheting up rhetoric around the military is the exact opposite tact we should be taking. There is an international legal regime in place plays to our strengths: it reaffirms Canada as a norm adherer, commits every one to a rule-based process as well as reinforces the norm that science and data are central to resolving disputes. For a middle (or model) power like Canada, it is hard to ask for a better outcome.

This isn’t to say we should have no military presence in the North – but by emphasizing the military aspect of the North we encourage others to deviate from a process that benefits us and push them towards one that can only hurt our interests. While it may be a simple vote-getter, let’s hope the Prime Minister tones down the rhetoric around the North – my suspicion is that a North that is truly militarized will be a massive drain on resources, an unwelcome distraction and ultimately, a vote loser.

19th Century Net Neutrality (and what it means for the 21st Century)

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So what do bits of data and coal locomotive have in common?

It turns out a lot.

In researching an article for a book I’ve discovered an interesting parallel between the two in regard to the issue of Net Neutrality. What is Net Neutrality? It is the idea that when you use the Internet, you do so free of restrictions. That any information you download gets treated the same as any other piece of information. This means that your Internet service provider (say Rogers, Shaw or Bell) can’t choose to provide you with certain content faster than other content (or worse, simply block you from accessing certain content altogether).

Normally the issue of Net Neutrality gets cast in precisely those terms – do bits of data flowing through fibre optic and copper cables get treated the same, regardless of whose computer they are coming from and whose computer they are going to. We often like to think these types of challenges are new, and unique, but one thing I love about being a student of history, is that there are almost always interesting earlier examples to any problem.

Take the late 19th and early 20th century. Although the term would have been foreign to them, Net Neutrality was a raging issue, but not in regard to the telegraph cables of the day.  No, it was an issue in regards to railway networks.

In 1903 the United States Congress passed the Elkins Act. The Act forbade railway companies from offering, and railway customers from demanding, preferential rates for certain types of goods. Any “good” that moved over the (railway) network had to be priced and treated the same as any other “good.” In short, the (railway) network had to be neutral and price similar goods equally. What is interesting is that many railway companies welcomed the act because some trusts (corporations) paid the standard rail rate but would then demand that the railroad company give them rebates.

What’s interesting to me is that

a) Net Neutrality was a problem back in the late 19th and early 20th century; and

b) Government regulation was seen as an effective solution to ensuring a transparent and fair market place on these networks

The question we have to ask ourselves is, do we want to ensure that the 21st century (fibre optic) networks will foster economic growth, create jobs and improve productivity in much the same way the 19th and 20th century (railway) networks did for that era? If the answer is yes, we’d be wise to look back and see how those networks were managed effectively and poorly.  The Elkins Act is an interesting starting point, as it represented progressives efforts to ensure transparency and equality of opportunity in the marketplace so that it could function as an effective platform for commerce.

Open Data – USA vs. Canada

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open-data-300x224When it comes to Open Data in Canada and the United States, things appear to be similar. Both countries have several municipalities with Open Data portals: Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and now New York City in the US, Vancouver and Nanaimo in Canada with Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary and Ottawa thinking about or initiating plans.

But the similarities end there. In particular there is a real, yawning gap at the federal level. America has data.gov but here in Canada there is no movement on the Open Data front. There are some open data sets, but nothing comprehensive, and nothing that follows is dedicated to following the three laws of open data. No data.gc.ca in the works. Not even a discussion. Why is that?

As esoteric as it may sound, I believe the root of the issues lies in the country’s differing political philosophies. Let me explain.

It is important to remember that the United States was founded on the notion of popular sovereignty. As such its sovereignty lies with the people, or as Wikipedia nicely puts it:

The American Revolution marked a departure in the concept of popular sovereignty as it had been discussed and employed in the European historical context. With their Revolution, Americans substituted the sovereignty in the person of the English king, George III, with a collective sovereign—composed of the people. Henceforth, American revolutionaries by and large agreed and were committed to the principle that governments were legitimate only if they rested on popular sovereignty – that is, the sovereignty of the people. (italics are mine)

Thus data created by the US government is, quite literally, the people’s data. Yes, nothing legally prevents the US government from charging for information and data but the country’s organizing philosophy empowers citizens to stand up and say – this is our data, we’d like it please. In the United States the burden is on the government to explain why it is withholding that which the people own (a tradition that admittedly is hardly perfect as anyone alive from the years 2000-2008 will attest to).  But don’t underestimate the power of this norm. Its manifestations are everywhere, such as in the legal requirement that any document created by the United States government be published in the public domain (e.g. it cannot have any copyright restrictions placed on it) or in America’s vastly superior Freedom of Information laws.

This is very different notion of sovereignty than exists in Canada. This country never deviated from the European context described above. Sovereignty in Canada does not lie with the people, indeed, it resides in King George the III’s descendant, the present day Queen of England. The government’s data isn’t your, mine, or “our” data. It’s hers. Which means it is at her discretion, or more specifically, the discretion of her government servants, to decide when and if it should be shared. This is the (radically different) context under which our government (both the political and public service), and its expectations around disclosure, have evolved. As an example, note that government documents in Canada are not public domain, they are published under a Crown Copyright that, while less restrictive than copyright, nonetheless constrains reuse (no satire allowed!) and is a constant reminder of the fact that Canadian citizens don’t own what their tax dollars create. The Queen does.

The second reason why open data has a harder time taking root in Canada is because of the structure of our government. In America, new projects are easier to kick start because the executive welds greater control over the public service. The Open Data initiative that started in Washington, D.C. spread quickly to the White House because its champion and mastermind, the District’s of Columbia’s CTO Vivek Kundra, was appointed Federal CIO by President Obama. Yes, Open Data tapped into an instinctual reflex to disclose that (I believe) is stronger down south than here, but it was executed because America’s executive branch is able to appoint officials much deeper into government (for those who care, in Canada Deputy Ministers are often appointed, but in the United States appointments go much deeper, down into the Assistant Deputy and even into the Director General level). Both systems have merits, and this is not a critic of Canada’s approach, simply an observation. However, it does mean that a new priority, like open data, can be acted upon quickly and decisively in the US. (For more on these difference I recommend reading John Ibbitson’s book Open & Shut).

These difference have several powerful implications for open data in Canada.

As a first principle, if Canadians care about open data we will need to begin fostering norms in our government, among ourselves, and in our politicians, that support the idea that what our government creates (especially in terms of research and data) is ours and that we should not only have unfettered access to it, but the right to analyze and repurpose it. The point here isn’t just that this is a right, but that open data enhances democracy, increases participation and civic engagement and strengthens our economy. Enhancing this norm is a significant national challenge, one that will take years to succeed. But instilling it into the culture of our public service, our civic discourse and our political process is essential. In the end, we have to ask ourselves – in a way our American counterparts aren’t likely to (but need to) – do we want an open country?

This means that secondly, Canadians are going to have to engage in a level of education of – particularly senior – public servants on open data that is much broader and more comprehensive than our American counterparts had to. In the US, an executive fiat and appointment has so far smoothed the implementation of open data solutions. That will likely not work here. We have many, many, many allies in the public service who believe in open data (and who understand it is integral to public service sector renewal). The key is to spread that knowledge and support upwards, to educate senior decision-makers, especially those at the DG, ADM and DM level to whom both the technology and concept is essentially foreign. It is critical that these decision-makers become comfortable with and understand the benefits of open data quickly. If not we are unlikely to keep pace with (or even follow) our American counterparts, something, I believe is essential for our government and economy.

Second, Canadians are going to have to mobilize to push for open data as a political issue. Even if senior public servants get comfortable with the idea, it is unlikely there will be action unless politicians understand that Canadians want both greater transparency and the opportunity to build new services and applications on government data.

(I’d also argue that another reason why Open Data has taken root in the US more quickly than here is the nature of its economy. As a country that thrives on services and high tech, open data is the basic ingredient that helps drive growth and innovation. Consequently, there is increasing corporate support for open data. Canada, in contrast, with its emphasis on natural resources, does not have a corporate culture that recognizes these benefits as readily.)

Closed Border, closed economy, closing opportunities

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The other day Tim O’Reilly tweeted about this New York Times article. Entitled – Chicago’s Loss: Is Passport Control to Blame? – the piece struck a chord with me since my last two efforts to cross into the United States from Canada have been dramatically unpleasant experiences. Turns out that others – including IOC selection committee members – feel the same way:

Among the toughest questions posed to the Chicago bid team this week in Copenhagen was one that raised the issue of what kind of welcome foreigners would get from airport officials when they arrived in this country to attend the Games. Syed Shahid Ali, an I.O.C. member from Pakistan, in the question-and-answer session following Chicago’s official presentation, pointed out that entering the United States can be “a rather harrowing experience.”

Border-SecurityHarrowing indeed! I crossed the border two weeks ago on my way to French Lick, Indiana, to attend a bio-informatics conference. I wasn’t paid to attend, and had been invited by the founders of OpenMRS to whom I occasionally volunteer some advice and just think are all around great guys who I’d do pretty much anything for. Is a conference work or pleasure? Not really either, but to be safe, I said work. Big mistake. The border security officer said he didn’t care if I was not getting paid, work is work (don’t even bother trying to explain to him what an open source community is) and he was inclined to red flag my passport and take away my TN (work) visa. It was a terrifying experience (and frankly, on the scale of what people can be accused or suspected of at the border economic issues are important but relatively less concerning than political or criminal ones – although don’t underestimate the fear generated by seeing part of ones livelihood flash before ones eyes).

All this is made worse by the fact that there is, effectively, no appeals process. Yes, maybe you can talk to somebody higher up, but the will likely take hours (long after your flight is to depart in 90 minutes) or even days (once the conference or event you intended to attend or speak at has long since ended). You are at the mercy of the person you’re in front of.

All this may sound unfortunate but it has significant implications, political and economic implications. International travel to the United States is down 10% in the first quarter of 2009 – a big part of this is likely related to the economy, but I suspect that fewer and fewer people are choosing the United States as a destination. But vacationers are minor in comparison to the impact on innovation and economic development. Today, it is harder and harder for the best minds in the world to work for American companies and to do graduate work at American universities. This means America’s elite will interact less and less with leading thinkers from elsewhere and its companies will have to rely on American talent, and not international talent, to succeed. 

Already the cracks are showing. Google has employees who are forced to work in Canada since they can’t work in the United States. And Microsoft recently opened a software development facility in Vancouver because US immigration laws made it too difficult to bring in top talent. Indeed, I’m increasingly persuaded that the new convention centre in Vancouver was a smart investment. If you are hosting a conference with Americans and internationals in attendance there is no way you are going to host it in the United States.

Do Americans understand what is going on? Probably not. While some of the above articles have appeared in the news section of the newspaper the Olympic story appeared in the Travel section – hardly the place to raise a red flag for politicians. At least the President seems to now understand that it is an issue:

President Obama, who was there as part of the 10-person team, assured Mr. Ali that all visitors would be made to feel welcome. “One of the legacies I want to see is a reminder that America at its best is open to the world,” he said.”

I hope he’s successful since the consequences of the status quo will be ugly for the United States. A closed border is like a closed mind – over time you become less receptive to new ideas or information and begin to atrophy.

Emergent Systems in Government: Let's put the horse before the cart

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Yesterday Paul McDowall, Knowledge Management Advisor at the Government’s School of the Public Service and chairperson of the Interdepartmental Knowledge Management Forum, wrote the following comment in response to a blog post from several months ago entitled “How GCPEDIA will save the public service.”

I’ve posted his comment – feel free to read it or skip it and go straight to my analysis below. In summary, what makes McDowall’s comments interesting isn’t just the argument (or its reactionary nature) but the underlying perspective/assumptions that drives it. It serves as a wonderful example of the tension between how the traditional hierarchical nature of the public service and some evolving emergent models that challenging this approach.

So first, McDowall:

Will GCPEDIA save the public service, or capture all the tacit knowledge that will walk out the door? No, of course not! To suggest otherwise is, frankly, naive hyperbole.

As great and as promising as GCPEDIA and other Web 2.0 tools are, tools will never save the public service. People are the public service and only people have the capacity to save the public service, and it will take a whole lot more to improve the weak areas of the public service than a tool. Things like leadership play a pretty important role in organizational effectiveness. There are many good Organizational Excellence models (I have researched this area) and they all include people and leadership as two elements, but funny enough, tools aren’t included. Why? Because it is not so much a tool issue as it is a craftsman issue.

With respect to your comment about tacit knowledge and social capital (not the same things by the way), I think it may be helfpul to brush up on what tacit knowledge is, and what Knowledge Management is.

It is unquestionably true that the public service continues to face a potential impact from demographic changes that are both extremely significant and yet unquantified. It is also unquestionably true that most public service organizations haven’t truly understood or addressed these potential impacts, to say nothing of the potential of improving their effectiness right NOW from better Knowledge Management (productivity, innovation, etc).

These issues need to be addressed by public service leaders in an intelligent and thoughtful manner. Tools can and certainly should help but only when wielded by craftsmen and women. For too long vendors have made grandiose and unrealizable promises about their ‘solutions’. I thought we had learned our lessons from all that experience.
Let’s not get the cart before the horse, shall we?

Paul McDowall
Knowledge Management Advisor and chairperson of the Interdepartmental Knowledge Management Forum

McDowall’s main concern appears to be that GCPEDIA doesn’t have a clear purpose and, more importantly, doesn’t serve a specific leadership objective. (If you are wondering how I gleaned that from the above, well, I cheated, I called McDowall to ask him more about his comment since the nature of his concern wasn’t clear to me). For those used to an era where IT projects were planned out from the beginning, everything was figured out in advance, and the needs of the leadership were the paramount priority, GCPEDIA would be disconcerting. Indeed, the very idea of unleashing people willy-nilly on a system would be an anathema. In short, when McDowall says, don’t put the horse before the cart, what he’s saying is, “you’ve rolled out a tool, and you don’t even know what you are going to use it for!”

This would appear to be rational concern. Except, many of the rules that underlay this type of thinking are disappearing. Indeed, had this type of thinking been adhered to, the web would not have developed.

First, The economics have changed. There was a time when IT projects necessarily costed tens of millions of dollars.  But GCPEDIA was built on a (free) open source platform using a handful of internal FTEs (making McDowell’s comments about vendors even more confusing). Indeed GCPEDIA has cost the public service virtually nothing to create. One invests in planning so as to avoid expensive or ineffective deployments. But if the costs of deployment are virtually zero and failure really isn’t that traumatic then… why waste time and years planning? Release, test, and adapt (or kill the project).

Second, with projects like this become cheap to deploy another important shift takes place. Users – not their bosses or a distant IT overlord – decide a) if they want to participate and b) co-develop and decide what is useful. This has powerful implications. It means that you had better serve a real (not perceived or mandated) need, and that, if successful, you’d better be prepared to evolve quickly. This, interestingly, is how that usefully little tool called the World Wide Web evolved. Read the original proposal to create the World Wide Web. IT departments of the world didn’t all collectively and suddenly decide that people should be made to use the web. No! It grew organically responding to demand. In addition, there is very little in it that talks about how we use the web today, users of the web (us!) have helped it evolve so that it serves us more effectively.

This is probably the biggest disconnect between McDowell and myself. He believes GCPEDIA is problematic (or at least won’t do the things I think it will do) because it doesn’t serve the leadership. I think it will work because it does something much better, it serves actual users – public servants (and thus, contrary to his argument, is very much about people). This includes, critically, capturing tacit knowledge and converting it into formal – HTML encoded – knowledge that helps build social capital (I do, actually, know the difference between the two).

Indeed, the last thing we need is a more leadership oriented public service, what we need is an employee centric public service. One that enables those who are actually doing the work to communicate, collaborate and work, more effectively. In this regard, I think GCPEDIA is demonstrating that it is effective (although it is still is very early days) with logarithmic growth, 8000+ users and 200 more signing up every week (all with virtually no promotional budget). Clearly some public servants are finding it to be at worst interesting, and at best, deeply enabling.

The Three Laws of Open Government Data

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Yesterday, at the Right To Know Week panel discussion – Conference for Parliamentarians: Transparency in the Digital Era – organized by the Office of the Information Commissioner I shared three laws for Open Government Data that I’d devised on the flight from Vancouver.

The Three Laws of Open Government Data:

  1. If it can’t be spidered or indexed, it doesn’t exist
  2. If it isn’t available in open and machine readable format, it can’t engage
  3. If a legal framework doesn’t allow it to be repurposed, it doesn’t empower

To explain, (1) basically means: Can I find it? If Google (and/or other search engines) can’t find it, it essentially doesn’t exist for most citizens. So you’d better ensure that you are optimized to be crawled by all sorts of search engine spiders.

After I’ve found it, (2) notes that, to be useful, I need to be able to play with the data. Consequently, I need to be able to pull or download it in a useful format (e.g. an API, subscription feed, or a documented file). Citizens need data in a form that lets them mash it up with Google Maps or other data sets, or analyze in Excel. This is essentially the difference between VanMaps (look, but don’t play) and the Vancouver Data Portal, (look, take and play!). Citizens who can’t play with information are citizens who are disengaged/marginalized from the discussion.

Finally, even if I can find it and play with it, (3) highlights that I need a legal framework that allows me to share what I’ve created, to mobilize other citizens, provide a new service or just point out an interesting fact. This is the difference between Canada’s House of Parliament’s information (which, due to crown copyright, you can take, play with, but don’t you dare share or re-publish) and say, Whitehouse.gov which “pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected.”

Find, Play and Share. That’s want we want.

Of course, a brief scan of the internet has revealed that others have also been thinking about this as well. There is this excellent 8 Principle of Open Government Data that are more detailed, and admittedly better, especially for a CIO level and lower conversation.  But for talking to politicians (or Deputy Ministers or CEOs), like those in attendance during yesterday’s panel or, later that afternoon, the Speaker of the House, I found the simplicity of three resonated more strongly; it is a simpler list they can remember and demand.

Today: "right to know" panel for parliamentarians

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Today from 10am-12am EST I’ll be a panelist for Conference for Parliamentarians: Transparency in the Digital Era a panel convened by the Office of the Information Commissioner as part of Right to Know Week. Apparently the Canadian School of Public Service will provide access to this conference as part of its Armchair Discussions (www.righttoknow.ca).

More on the panel:

This conference aims to engage Parliamentarians in a debate and reflection on the new paradigm that the digital world has introduced for the right to know. Greater transparency in the digital era requires more than sound information management and the use of state-of-the-art information technology. It calls for a fundamental change of attitudes from disclosing information on a need-to-know basis to managing information with the presumption of disclosure as the default mode. How can public institutions trigger and accelerate this change of attitudes for the benefit of Canadians?

For those who are interested you can see my slides (sans audio, I’m afraid) below.

Government Transparency In A Digital Age

View more presentations from David Eaves.

The Bottled Water Debate Redux (a public policy case)

I’m a big believer that public policy cannot be written in a vacuum. All too often people become obsessed that their issue or problem is the only problem and so design policies that address their concern while ignoring secondary effects that can be as, if not more, costly.

This has been my point in the debate on bottled water. An outright ban might decrease the number of bottles that head to the landfill every year, but at what cost? First, if someone doesn’t buy water, I’ve suggested there is a good chance they’ll by something else… say Coke… which has many more calories and is less healthy. What are the aggregate health costs of having people drink more high-fructose corn syrup? Secondarily, if people are buying other drinks, then they aren’t really reducing the amount of waste, they are simply substituting it with other waste. We need to understand the bottled water not as strictly and environmental issue, but as a systems problem that impacts a number of areas. (Hence, why I’ve argued for any, and preferably larger, deposits on bottled water).

When I’ve written about this is the past some people have understandably disagreed with my logic, claiming that those who buy bottled water would never (or only rarely) buy a different, higher calorie drink. Recently, however, I stumbled across this interesting article in The Telegraph. It discusses the decline consumption of bottled water in Britain. The quote I found particularly interesting was this one:

Last year the bottled water market suffered a significant fall, as consumers – swayed by an environmental campaign and the high cost – turned away from the once fashionable drink.

However, figures from the market research firm AC Nielsen, which tracks in detail the spending habits of tens of thousands of consumers each week, indicated that 71 per cent of the money saved was spent not on free tap water, but rather than sugary soft drinks…

…this equates to Britons consuming an extra 1,700 tonnes of sugar and 6.8 billion calories,

So it would appear that if we ban bottled water there is a cost – in terms of health – that we should be expected to pay as a society. Moreover, while there is some reduction in waste it is not absolute, indeed, since just over 70% of money is still spent on beverages it is quite significant. This of course is because (as I’ve been arguing) people aren’t buying the water, they are buying the convenience (something they are less willing to pay for during a recession and hence the decline). Indeed, this hypothesis has been confirmed by another British survey conducted by the University of Birmingham. Its researchers:

…found that convenience and taste — not health — were the main motivating factors for choosing bottled water.

“The majority of participants believed that bottled water has some health benefits, but that they were not necessarily significant or superior to the benefits provided by tap water. Convenience and taste were more influential factors for participants when deciding to buy a bottle of water”.

So let us stop trying to scare or guilt consumers out of buying bottled water and instead focus on solutions that address both health and environmental issues. I suspect that if we increased bottle deposits significantly on all beverage containers (and made sure water containers had deposits on them) we might discover that people a) buy fewer beverages, b) will be more inclined to recycle/re-use the containers and c) don’t create an incentive to purchase sugary high-fructose beverages over water.

Okay, barring some national emergency, I promise not to write on bottled water again for a while – it’s just that the topic makes for such a great policy case study on looking at an issue as a system versus seeing it as single issue problem.