Open Data May Arrive in Canada - from Civil Servants ?

Michael Hardner · January 31, 2011

OTTAWA - Civil servants are forging ahead with an open-data strategy for the federal government while politicians drag their heels on a formal policy.
A parliamentary committee has been studying the issue since last April and resumes debate this week, but documents obtained under Access to Information show that bureaucrats started drafting a plan in July.

Unlike the United States and Britain, Canada has no formal federal policy of making raw, taxpayer-funded data freely available to the public.

Civil servants have realized that needs to change.

At the July meeting to kick off the strategy, they drafted a five-point plan.

Further proof that Canadians are too complacent when it comes to demanding more from their institutions. But good to hear that the civil service itself is taking steps.

GostHacked · January 31, 2011

I agree we are too complacent. But I am suspect of the government when they say they want more openness to the public. This usually means it will go the exact opposite. If the civil servants are for the openness, are they going to act as the watchdog as well to make sure the information is available? I guess we can also expect more bureaucracy.

The_Squid · February 1, 2011

I agree we are too complacent. But I am suspect of the government when they say they want more openness to the public. This usually means it will go the exact opposite. If the civil servants are for the openness, are they going to act as the watchdog as well to make sure the information is available? I guess we can also expect more bureaucracy.

No, not at all....

I work with government data all the time, collected by civil servants for their own purposes. There are people in government who have set up their own processes for people to access this data that avoids the bureaucratic nightmare of "freedom of information" requests. These take months and is a bureaucratic tangle of people from Ottawa passing along the request, it moves down a chain to the local level... the local civil servant sends the data to the FOI department who scrutinize it and, eventually, pass it along.

You have to get your request exactly correct because there is no interaction between the person who made the request and those filling the request. This works on some things (e-mail chains?), but not scientific data.

So I go straight to the source and they release the data for my request if they can.

The only problem is you have to know who to go to for the data. It isn't publicized and there is no formalized policy or process across departments other than FOI. I happen to work with progressive people who know that their data is being collected for the people of Canada, as well as for their own purposes.

Edited February 1, 2011 by The_Squid