Science Library Pad

Canada and US at Open Government Partnership Brasilia Conference

Minister Tony Clement @TonyClementCPC and Erik Waddell @ErikWaddell of Treasury Board Secretariat are part of the Canadian delegation for the Open Government Partnership Conference.

The US delegation is headed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her remarks at the conference opening are available (text and video).

UPDATE: Minister Clement's speech text is available - Speech by Tony Clement, President of the Treasury Board and Minister Responsible for FedNor, Presenting the Government of Canada's Action Plan on Open Government.  ENDUPDATE

Here's a brief Storify of Canadian-related #ogp2012 tweets for April 17, 2012 (I will update it if there are more):

Previously:

See previous posts in category opengovca

Canadian Open Government Action Plan

President of the Treasury Board Tony Clement announced Canada's Open Government Action Plan in Regina (April 11, 2012).

@TonyclementCPC Announces Open Gov Action Plan for Canada and applauds @CityofRegina for #opendata launch. #yqr

— Alyssa Daku (@AlyssaDaku) April 11, 2012

The plan can be found on the Canadian Open Government site open.gc.ca: Canada's Action Plan on Open Government.  It outlines three years of progressive commitments to improving and strengthening Canada's three pillars: open information, open data and open dialogue.  Delivering the action plan now was part of the requirements for Canada's membership in the Open Government Partnership (and should eventually be posted at http://www.opengovpartnership.org/countries/canada ).  Minister Clement will be at the OGP meeting in Brasilia this month.

The plan has two foundational committments: an Open Government Directive and and Open Government License.

Open Government Directive

In Year 1 of our Action Plan, we will confirm our policy direction for Open Government by issuing a new Directive on Open Government. The Directive will provide guidance to 106 federal departments and agencies on what they must do to maximize the availability of online information and data, identify the nature of information to be published, as well as the timing, formats, and standards that departments will be required to adopt. ...

The clear goal of this Directive is to make Open Government and open information the 'default' approach.

Open Government License

... we will issue a new universal Open Government License in Year 1 of our Action Plan with the goal of removing restrictions on the reuse of published Government of Canada information (data, info, websites, publications) and aligning with international best practices. ...

The purpose of the new Open Government License will be to promote the re-use of federal information as widely as possible.

These are two clear actions that have great potential.

I won't list all the other details, just a bit from the open data activity stream, which indicates an updated portal in years 2-3 of the Action Plan:

During Year 1 of our Action Plan, we will continue to expand on the number of datasets made available through the existing portal, and we will complete our requirements for the next generation platform. In Years 2 and 3, we will design and initiate implementation of the new data.gc.ca portal, as well as further improve the level of standardization of data published by departments. The Government will make use of crowdsourcing, particularly among Canada's open data community, to make sure that this new open data portal meets the needs and expectations of those who will use it most

I think the government would be wise to look at the agile iterative approach demonstrated by the UK Government Digital Service as an model for revising the portal to meet user needs.

On Twitter

• Tony Clement - @TonyClementCPC
• Treasury Board Secretariat - @TBS_Canada
• Open Government Partnership - @opengovpart
  Brasilia conference hashtag now changed to #ogp2012
• UK Government Digital Service - @govuk
• UK Open Public Data - @datagovuk

Open Government Partnership Canadian contact

The contact for all matters related to Canada's participation in the Open Government Partnership is

Stephen Walker,

Chief Information Officer Branch, Treasury Board Secretariat

stephen.walker@tbs-sct.gc.ca

UPDATE 2012-04-18: TBS Press Releases - Minister Clement Releases Open Government Action Plan and Minister Clement Attends International Open Government Partnership. Minister Clement's speech announcing the Action Plan - Speech by Tony Clement, President of the Treasury Board of Canada, to Regina and District Chamber of Commerce.  Minister Clement announces Canada's official membership - Canada Joins International Open Government Partnership.

At the time of this writing the Open Government Partnership conference is underway in Brasilia, there is a webcast available.  Minister Clement @TonyClementCPC and Erik Waddell @ErikWaddell are attending, along with others from the government and civil society (see list at bottom of blog post Canadian Open Government Consultation Final Report).

ENDUPDATE

Previously

You can see previous items related to this topic in category opengovca

Canadian Open Government Consultation Final Report

The Final Report of the Canadian Open Government Consultation has been posted

http://open.gc.ca/consult/results-resultatstb-eng.asp

It's a straightforward summary of the input provided.

There were over 260 submissions to the online consultation.

President of the Treasury Board Tony Clement states

These consultations were also instrumental in developing our Open Government Action Plan which I will present in April 2012 at the Open Government Partnership in Brazil. Each element of the Action Plan is supported by what we heard during the consultation process.

The key messages reported are

• Make information and data easier to find by improving the search function on government websites.
• Improve the organization of government websites, in general, by creating centralized portal(s) to provide catalogues of Government of Canada information and data in one place.
• Make more information and data available in standardized open formats with improved metadata, tagging and indexing.
• Promote the availability of open data through better communications and marketing.
• Improve consultation tools and websites by making them more user-friendly (e.g., plain language, no acronyms, etc.) and more interactive through the use of social media.
• Ensure that Canadians know that consultations are taking place and demonstrate that something is being done with consultation results.
• Be more open with Canadians by improving policies and rules so that government data and information is open by default.

The final report itself doesn't provide any specific information about what will be included in the Open Government Action Plan, however the January 2012 update to the Open Government Partnership described some initial possibilities.

UPDATE 2012-04-18: The Open Government Action Plan was released on April 11, 2012.  ENDUPDATE

Canada's Action Plan will be posted to is posted at the OGP website

http://www.opengovpartnership.org/countries/canada

The OGP meeting is in Brasilia, April 17-18, 2012. The OGP has posted a preliminary list of attendees (Excel format).

Canadian representitives listed are

• Stephen Walker - Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) - Stephen is the contact for all OGP related matters: stephen.walker@tbs-sct.gc.ca
• Tony Clement - President of the Treasury Board - @TonyClementCPC
• Erik Waddell - TBS - @ErikWaddell
• Michael Gurstein - Centre for Community Informatics Research, Development and Training - @michaelgurstein
• Harvey Low - Representative - Canadian Council on Social Development, Community Data Program
• Fernando Perini - International Development Research Centre (IDRC) - @fperini
• David Eaves - @daeaves - David is also on the Canadian Government Advisory Panel on Open Government
• Pierre Boucher - Deputy CIO of Canada

The hashtag is for the event is #OGPBrasilia2012 #ogp2012 and the Twitter ID is @opengovpart

Centre for Community Informatics Research, Development and Training

Open Gov Partnership Brasilia meeting - who should represent Canadian civil society?

I don't know the answer to this, so I'm blogging my lack of knowledge in the hopes of feedback.  I had a brief discussion with Chris Moore about how to proceed.

In short, who should represent Canadian civil society at OGP Brasilia in April?

Canada is part of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), and is developing its committments, with the country action plan indicated on the site as coming in March 2012 (the deadline for action plans is April 9, 2012).

http://www.opengovpartnership.org/countries/canada

The Canadian consultation about open government ends January 16, 2012.

The big OGP conference is in April 2012 in Brasilia.  42 new member countries will formally present their Action Plans at this meeting, with updates from the 8 founding members.

This Annual Conference will be April 16-18.  The page states

At this high-level OGP annual meeting, governments, civil society and the private sector will come together as new OGP participant countries deliver their final OGP action plans and formally endorse the OGP declaration of principles. The event will feature a series of high-level panels, small group sessions and an open government innovation exhibition focused on sharing best practices and continuing to drive innovation... 

In terms of civil society participation, the OGP announced that they could fund 1 civil society representative from each country, as well as offering 50-70 registration slots for self-funded civil society attendance.

OGP has resources to support the participation of up to one civil society representative from each of the 50 OGP participating countries. In addition, we have space for around 50-70 self-financed regional/international civil society representatives to participate.

The deadline to apply is February 6, 2012.  The OGP website has information on how to apply.

The OGP has said it wants local civil society to sort out who should go.

Wherever possible, OGP is seeking to have local civil society in each OGP country select their representative to the April 2012 conference themselves, rather than OGP picking the candidate. OGP will privilege applications from civil society representatives that can demonstrate an established track record of active engagement in the open government field, and the endorsement of fellow local civil society colleagues to attend the April 2012 [meeting]. 

In instances where local civil society cannot come to agreement on a common delegate to attend the April 2012 meeting, the OGP Support Unit will do its best to recommend the candidate from that country whose application demonstrates the most experience and strongest civil society networks in the open government field. 

I don't know of any national civil society organisations in Canada that speak about open government or e-government issues (there doesn't appear to be e.g. an Electronic Frontier Foundation equivalent - there is an Electronic Frontier Canada but its "Current Issues" are from 2004).

We are however rich in regional organisations, such as Montréal Ouvert and Open Data Ottawa.

So we as open government supporters have two challenges: who should go as the funded civil society representative, and who (if anyone) should represent Canada on a self-funded basis (along with possible fundraising).

As I stated at the outset, I don't know the answer to these questions.  I look forward to your ideas and feedback.

Twitter:

• @opengovpart - Open Government Partnership
• @_i_am_chris - Chris J Moore
• #OGP - general Open Government Partnership discussions (but noisy, many other topics on #OGP)
• #OGPBrasilia2012 - specifically about the upcoming conference
• I have been using #opengovca for Canadian-specific open government
• The Canadian Twitter consultation used #opengovchat and #parlonsgouvert

Previously:
December 18, 2011  open gov video - Minister Clement speaks at Public Sector Engage - Nov 22, 2011
December 15, 2011  Canadian #opengovchat - archives & hackfests

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).

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