Science Library Pad

Wordclouds of open data responses to Canadian Open Government Consultation Week 2

Wordle wordclouds of the responses to Canadian Open Government Consultation question 1 "What could be done to make it easier for you to find and use government data provided online?"

I have made a Google Doc of the raw text itself.  All English answers up to 1356 Eastern on 2011-12-19 are included.

with the word "data" removed:

with the words "data" and "government" removed:

UPDATE 2011-12-20: The official Weekly Summary for Week 2 of the consultation is available.

Previously:
December 10, 2011  Wordclouds of open data responses to Canadian Open Government Consultation Week 1

open gov video - Minister Clement speaks at Public Sector Engage - Nov 22, 2011

President of the Treasury Board Tony Clement gave a keynote address to open Public Sector Engage 2011.  He begins speaking at 03m15s in. The text of the speech is available, although he makes some asides that I believe are not in the text.

Opening remarks by the President of the Treasury Board and Minister responsible for FedNor, Tony Clement from PSEngage on Vimeo.

Key phrases:

• the importance of a collaborative approach
• technology as an important tool for change
• sometimes innovation means that you're going into areas that have not been gone through before
• Internet tools allow public sector employees to be more productive than ever before [my translation from the French]
• the public service must make sure it possesses the capacity and the expertise necessary to respond not only to today's demands, but also in 5, 10, 20 years [my translation from the French]
• competencies related to work, teams and collaboration will be necessary [my translation from the French]
• "I consider myself the Minister responsible for championing innovation in the government"
• the use of productivity-enhancing Internet-based tools & services that allow people to share information, engage in a dialogue, and collaborate
• open government in Canada: open data, open information, and open dialogue
• Canada has signaled its intent to join the international Open Government Partnership

Direct quote from Minister Clement:

Our government is encouraging the use of new Web 2.0 tools and technologies such as of course blogs, wikis, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube... you name it. These tools help create a more modern, open and collaborative workplace and lead to more just-in-time communications with the public. I was recently before a Senate committee reviewing these issues and I said it makes no sense to have our employees--any employee--but certainly our new employees to have more access and more interaction in the coffee shop on their way to work than actually in their workplace. That is not a workplace of the future... I see a few heads nodding here so I think I've struck a little bit of a chord.

UPDATE 2011-12-19: You can watch his Senate committee testimony as well as read some of the quotes, linked from my posting Internet & social media - Official Languages examination - Senate Committee videos.

Previously:
November 23, 2011  Treasury Board President Clement speaks about open government, social media [also from the PSE2011 event]

Wordclouds from English opengovchat - Dec 15, 2011

Wordle wordclouds from English #opengovchat on December 15, 2011 from the opening announcement to 18h45 (specifically from @Mod_TBS_SCT at 16:58:41 to @dlq 18:45:18).   Text extracted from a Twitter archive I made.  High-frequency words like opengovchat itself, as well as Canada and RT were removed.  In some wordclouds opengov was also removed.  It doesn't keep things with underscores together (e.g. @Mod_TBS_SCT or @TBS_Canada) which is why you get some partial Twitter user IDs.  Also in some Wordle removed the @ signs.

Previously:
December 15, 2011  Canadian #opengovchat - archives & hackfests

Canadian #opengovchat - archives & hackfests

Minister Clement's Twitter chat as part of the Canadian Open Government Consultation is complete.  It was first in French avec le mot-clic #parlonsgouvert and then in English with hashtag #opengovchat

I made an Archivist backup of the tweets in both languages, there are 1102 tweets in the archive, the snapshot was taken 18h45 Eastern on December 15, 2011.  Available in XML and Excel XLSX.

@kady did a CoverItLive liveblog that captured English tweets and Joseph @Thornley made a Storify of the English tweets.

The official archive will be up on December 16, 2011 at open.gc.ca

UPDATE 2011-12-16: Elizabeth Thompson of iPolitics did a very good Storify that sets out blocks of questions and responses.  Mark Blevis used some software to analyse the English chat.  And open.gc.ca published transcripts of the English and French discussions.  ENDUPDATE

UPDATE 2011-12-18: I made some wordclouds of the English-language discussion.  ENDUPDATE

I have done a short Storify below just on the Q&A about hackfests and contests (including one question from me).

learning about open data from our peers

We're only in the early days of national-scale open data across a broad spectrum of data sources.  Data.gov launched in May 2009.  (Historical sidebar: I created the Data.gov Wikipedia page in April 2009.)  Data.gov.uk had its big launch in January 2010.  So we're about two and a half years in.

Amazing things have happened.

Municipalities across Canada and around the world have open data sites.  The EC has announced a strategy for open data from the European Commission.  The World Bank has not only released open data at data.worldbank.org but is also providing support to emerging countries to help them in their open government and open data initiatives.

Communities are being formed.  The World Bank has launched an initiative called the Open Development Technology Alliance (OpenDTA) and organised an event "How Can Countries Start and Run Open Data Ecosystems?"

The three-hour event had a lot of great information, but I found one presentation in particular provided a great summary of the challenges of national open data.  Al Kags, the chair of the Kenya Open Data Taskforce, presented "6 [Building] Blocks of Open Data" (PowerPoint).

His list is

1. Leadership
2. Policy & Legal Framework
3. Technology & Apps
4. Capacity Building
5. Citizen Engagement
6. Innovation & Financing

In his deck, he has colour-coded these to ideas in his first slide, which is a mind map of the connections between the many pieces needed for a successful, sustainable open data initiative.

If I look at Canada, we are well positioned for the first two at a national level, but there is much work to be done on the other four building blocks.

One step would be developer and citizen outreach.  Data.gov has a /developers page which leads to discussion forums.  Data.gov.uk has a top-level item that links to their forum.  data.gouv.fr links to the Etalab group that created the site, where there is extensive explanatory information in the form of audio, video, documents, blog posts and presentations.  Data.worldbank.org has a /developers page and a pointer to their Google Groups discussion.  Kenya's open data site has a /developers page.  These all provide connection points that help build the ecosystem.

I also found it notable that not just this presentation but other speakers mentioned the value of different *Camps and Hackathons as ways of innovating and engaging with developers, citizens and civil society.

I encourage you to review Mr. Kags' presentation and think about how his lessons can apply to your municipal / provincial / national initiative.  This kind of thinking can also help when working on national Action Plans as part of the Open Government Partnership.  This kind of sharing also illustrates the tremendous opportunity we all have to learn from one another worldwide.  It was wonderful to see the energy, enthusiasm and insights from countries on different stages of this path towards more open and transparent government.

UPDATE 2011-12-16: I neglected  to mention that the meeting was ably chaired by Neil Fantom, and I have added his Twitter ID below.  ENDUPDATE

Many World Bank Links

Two things launched today:

1. Open Development Technology Alliance (OpenDTA.org)
2. Five discussion papers on Scribd, with commenting enabled

The speakers also pointed to the existing Open Data Innovations Group on LinkedIn (ODIN, Twitter hashtag #odin) as another place for discussion of these issues.

The video and liveblog coverage (which is available for replay using CoverItLive) are both up at live.worldbank.org

The video is in Windows Media format, it will play on a Mac using the free Flip4Mac components.

@WorldBankICT says the video will be up soon on the event webcast archives page (which is different from the live page): http://go.worldbank.org/77KTMO8B90

UPDATE 2011-12-15: Thanks to @livbarton in the comments and on Twitter for letting me know that the video is now up on the live page.  I have updated the text above accordingly.  ENDUPDATE

The event webpage itself, with some of the presentations, is http://go.worldbank.org/Y2PF8NAYM0 (I believe they will try to get more presentations up)

(I'm glad I have Twitter links otherwise I would probably never have found any of the above pages.)

I made an Archivist file of the #opendta tweets, in the archive I put together there are 611 tweets from the December 14, 2011 event and an additional 189 tweets related to the December 8, 2011 $35 Tablets event.  The archive is available in XML and Excel XLSX formats.

The World Bank has many organisation and individual Twitter accounts, some to follow related to this event are

• @worldbankdata
• @worldbankICT - the Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) sector at the World Bank
• @eDevelopment - the role of ICT in development
• @worldbankDM - World Bank Development Marketplace
• @worldbanklive and hashtag #wblive

• @tkb - Tariq Khokhar - Open Data Evangelist at the World Bank
• @alwalji - Aleem Walji - Practice Manager for Innovation and Technology at the World Bank Institute
• @neilfantom - Neil Fantom - Manager, Development Data Group, World Bank

And here are a couple of my tweets (@scilib, the QR Code), up on the World Bank's video stream for a moment (I was running it in a window in the corner of my screen, so it's a small grab that's not actually readable):

Wordclouds of open data responses to Canadian Open Government Consultation Week 1

Responses are available per-question, however unfortunately there is no text download; I had to scrape the responses from the site.  Here are wordclouds of the responses to the Open Data section, question 1 "What could be done to make it easier for you to find and use government data provided online?" as of the morning of December 10, 2011 (the first week of the consultation).  Note that the Open Information section has the same question for information rather than data "What could be done to make it easier for you to find government information online?"  It's not clear to me how many people will distinguish between finding data and finding information.

The raw text I scraped is available in a Google Doc.

The three images below (generated using wordle) are all the same text, just different arrangements.  I also did one with open data questions 1 & 3 combined, but the results weren't much different.  Since there's no tag/hashtag declared for the consultation, I just tagged them with the Twitter tag for the the upcoming discussion: opengovchat

Previously:
December 6, 2011  Public consultation on Canadian Open Government

Next:
December 19, 2011  Wordclouds of open data responses to Canadian Open Government Consultation Week 2

Public consultation on Canadian Open Government

Online consultation is up at http://www.open.gc.ca/consult/menu-eng.asp (en français http://www.ouvert.gc.ca/consult/menu-fra.asp ).

Deadline January 16, 2012.

Input to the online consultation can be by answering the questions and/or uploading a document.

Twitter chats will be hosted by President of the Treasury Board Tony Clement, but not on his account, on the new Treasury Board Secretariat accounts:

La discussion sur Twitter sur le gouvernement ouvert se déroulera le 15 décembre en français de 16 h à 16 h 45 (HNE) Compte: @SCT_Canada Mot-clic: #parlonsgouvert

The English tweet chat on Open Government will take place on December 15 from 5:00 to 5:45 p.m. EST.  Account: @TBS_Canada Hashtag: #opengovchat

The input will be used for both the government's internal planning as well as the action plan to be provided to the Open Government Partnership.

A final report on the findings from this consultation will be posted to this site in March 2012. Your input will help define areas of focus for the future of Canada’s Open Government initiative, including Canada’s Open Government action plan for the international Open Government Partnership.

from Open Government - open.gc.ca - Tell Us What You Think

UPDATE 2011-12-07: Comments from participants as well as weekly summaries will be posted to What We've Heard.  (If you have given Consent for Public Posting when you fill in the online consultation.)  In general each section allows up to 4000 characters for your response.  ENDUPDATE

There is also a press release about the consultation.

Canada's OGP Action Plan will be posted to http://www.opengovpartnership.org/countries/canada

The Open Government Partnership tweets at @opengovpart

UPDATE: The questions for the online consultation are available for you to preview before you answer.

Here are the Open Data questions:

Open Data - offers government data in more useful formats to enable citizens, the private sector and non-government organizations to leverage in innovative and value-added ways. This refers to Government of Canada data, which is information that is factual and usually statistical in nature, e.g. the number of people living in various regions of Canada. In this context, please respond to the following questions:

1. What could be done to make it easier for you to find and use government data provided online?

2. What types of open data sets would be of interest to you? Please pick up to three categories below and specify what data would be of interest to you.

   • Agriculture and Fisheries (e.g. farm operators’ income statistics, import/export data for dairy/meat/poultry)
   • Arts, Culture, and History (e.g. radio listening time, soldiers of First World War)
   • Demographics (e.g. consumer price index, university enrolment, Canada’s population)
   • Economics and Industry (e.g. gross domestic product, border wait times, home building starts)
   • Foreign Affairs and International assistance (e.g. immigration application statistics, permanent resident statistics)
   • Health and Safety (e.g. adverse reactions to health products, helmet use, immunization, number of police officers by province)
   • Labour (e.g. distribution of labour force, weekly earnings, hourly wages)
   • Nature and Environment (e.g. insecticide use, greenhouse gas emissions, Canadian tides)
   • Parks and Recreation (e.g. spectator sports, travel by Canadians
   • Public Finances and Expenditure (e.g. budgeted and in-year expenditures, government assets and liabilities, business prequalified to supply goods to government)
   • Science and Technology (e.g. domestic spending on science and technology, spills technology)
   • Other (please specify)
3. How would you use or manipulate this data?

Previously

November 23, 2011  Treasury Board President Clement speaks about open government, social media
January 28, 2011  open government in Canada - submit your thoughts to Parliament

See Also

Digital Economy Strategy 2010 Public Consultation

• Consultation Paper
• What Was Said: Idea Forums
• What Was Said: Submissions