Science Library Pad

Open Government Partnership and Canada - survey and more

Survey about open government in Canada: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ogpcanadaenglish

Deadline November 8, 2013.

Canada is a member of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), an international organisation.

The OGP has a third-party Independent Reporting Mechanism, to assess how civil society sees the progress of individual countries.

One of the main things it looks at is whether a country is meeting its Action Plan.

Here's Canada's Open Government Action Plan, Year 1

• on Canada's site: http://data.gc.ca/eng/canadas-action-plan-open-government
• on the Open Government Partnership site: http://www.opengovpartnership.org/country/canada/action-plan

NOTE: The original Canadian Open Government site open.gc.ca is gone and all of its links are broken; it redirects to data.gc.ca

Countries do their own self-assessments, in addition to the third-party assessment.  The Canadian self-assessment (the government's assessment of its own progress) is available at: http://data.gc.ca/eng/implementation-canadas-action-plan-open-government-year-1-self-assessment-report

If you have feedback for the third-party report you still have time to complete the official independent survey (also linked at the top of this post).  The independent reporting is being done by Dr. Mary Francoli of Carleton University. 

You can read more about the Independent Reporting Mechanism on the OGP site: http://www.opengovpartnership.org/about/about-irm

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As part of Canada's participation in the OGP, this year Canada is co-chairing the Open Data Working Group (one of five new thematic working groups).

You can contact the organisers of the working groups if you're interested in joining.

You can follow the livestream of the Open Data Working Group meeting from the OGP Summit, on October 31, from 10:15am Eastern to 11:30am (2:15pm GMT to 3:30pm).

UPDATE 2013-11-01: Video now on YouTube #OGP13 Summit: Open Data Working Group (starts at 08m10s). ENDUPDATE

Group Anchors for the Open Data Working Group are:

Stephen Walker, Senior Director, Open Government and Information Management, Treasury Board Secretariat, Government of Canada

José M. Alonso, Open Data Program Manager, Web Foundation and Member, Global Open Data Initiative

You can follow:

• OGP Summit 2013: #OGP13 and event website with livestream links http://www.opengovpartnership.org/get-involved/london-summit-2013
• Stephen Walker: @sbwalker61 (rarely used).  Organisation: @TBS_Canada and the data.gc.ca blog
• Jose Alonso: @josemalonso Website http://josema.net/ Organisation: @webfoundation and website http://www.webfoundation.org/

Previously:
April 11, 2012  Canadian Open Government Action Plan
April 18, 2012  Canada and US at Open Government Partnership Brasilia Conference

Related articles

How open is your government? Get the data | Claire Provost

Who Does it Best When it Comes to Open Data?

Ontario open government survey

The Province of Ontario is running a survey about open government

http://www.ontario.ca/government/open-government-initial-survey

including questions about what types of open data citizens would like released.

This is part of a larger open government initiative announced on October 21, 2013.

The Ontario open data portal had already soft-launched on November 8, 2012.

General URL http://ontario.ca/open

Twitter hashtag #openON

Feedback can also be provided via the general contact form.

Canadian open access policy - consultation

The three Canadian granting councils (funding for researchers) are NSERC (natural sciences), SSHRC (social sciences), and CIHR (health & medicine). Collectively the Tri-Councils or Tri-Agencies. They have a proposed open access policy available as HTML and PDF.

Please note that the draft policy is accessible until December 13, at which time the consultation period ends. Responses should be sent electronically to [email protected]

Please indicate the section(s) of the draft policy being referred to, within your written feedback. For more information please consult our Frequently Asked Questions or contact [email protected]

Information from Consultation on the draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy.

CIHR has an existing policy, including support for the use of PMC Canada for access to papers.

Disclaimer: My organisation at NRC is one of the partners in PMC Canada.

Related articles

Canadian Tri-Agency Draft Open Access Policy & Consultations: NSERC, SSHRC, CIHR [Confessions of a Science Librarian]

Canadian research funding agencies want feedback on open access

Government Open Source: Web Experience Toolkit

The Web Experience Toolkit has been in the news lately, with mentions in Mashable and Fast Company due to appearing on GitHub and Government.

It also got positive mentions from David Eaves and Ben Balter at the Code for America Summit.

Below is a Storify of recent mentions:

collaborate to change the Canadian public service

Canadian public servant Stephen Walker, Senior Director, Open Government and Information Management posts on the data.gov.uk blog:

This fall, the Government of Canada (GC) will release its Directive on Open Government, defining more clearly than ever before, the obligation that employees have to deliver open data, open information, and open dialogue to Canadians. In addition, our Blueprint 2020 initiative further challenges employees to envision the future of the public service. In the UK, the government has already started to address this need for culture change in the 2012 Open Data White Paper: Unleashing the Potential.

By working together, we can strengthen our ability to find new ways to harness the power of the public service. Our new public service needs to be more creative and proactive in releasing data, and in building relationships which optimize the use of that data. These relationships help to bridge the transitional gap of cultural change that is needed to spur opportunity for innovation, and to revamp how the government provides high quality services to its citizens.

from data.gov uk blogs - Now is the Time to Collaborate on Cultural Change - October 11, 2013

The UK Open Data White Paper is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-data-white-paper-unleashing-the-potential

Canada's national open data portal also has a blog http://data.gc.ca/eng/blog

The Clerk of the Privy Council's website has information about Blueprint 2020.

Related articles

News story: Transatlantic Hangout: supporting open data innovation and business

Canadian national app development competition - CODE 2014

The Canadian Open Data Experience – CODE – is a 48 hour nationwide app development competition

The event is sort of softlaunched, in that the date isn't posted yet. Minister Clement announced it, and later said

The other thing that I announced today, by the way, is our first appathon, where we're going to invite entrepreneurs of all ages next February [2014] to go onto the data.gc.ca website/portal and in a 48-hour period come up with the next app that uses Canada's open government data and develop something that will be of use to citizens

Possibly this will be timed to coincide with International Open Data Day 2014 on February 22, I don't know.

UPDATE 2014-01-09: CODE event will be February 28th to March 2nd  ENDUPDATE

There is a basic signup site at http://www.canadianopendataexperience.com/ and social media

• Twitter @CODE_hackathon and currently the rather overloaded hashtag #CODE
• Facebook https://www.facebook.com/CanadianOpenDataExperience

The government is supporting it, but not running it.  It will be run by XMG, who do the similarly-named but separate Great Canadian Appathon (it's not clear if the events will be one and the same in 2014).

open data speed dating - tweets from GTEC 2013

The Open Data Speed Dating at GTEC 2013 event was a success.

There's a photo gallery of images taken by an official GTEC photographer.

Here's a Storify of all the tweets from the event (there were about 200).