Minister Brison (President of the Treasury Board) will host a Google Hangout on Open Government, specifically on Canada's next national action plan for open government (as part of Canada's participation in the Open Government Partnership).
From March 31 to May 15, 2016 the government is running an online ideas consultation ("ideas market") where open government ideas for the Action Plan 2016-2018 can be submitted, upvoted, searched, and commented upon.
You can see the current ideas and submit your own at
The Government is committed to accelerating and expanding open data initiatives and to better involving Canadians in policy-making. Budget 2016 proposes to provide $11.5 million over five years to double the Treasury Board Secretariat’s budget for open government activities. This funding will allow the Treasury Board Secretariat to enhance its capacity to support engagement with Canadians, to design and deliver an ambitious open government strategy and to accelerate the provision of digital content.
Table 7.1 Open and Transparent Government indicates this $11.5 million will be allocated as $2.5 million in 2016-2017 and $2.5 million in 2017-2018, with the remaining $6.5 million from 2018-2021.
Presentations and Information
Minister Brison presented at the Canadian Open Dialogue Forum.
You can see the presentation on YouTube, from 41:40 to 1:02:48
In his speaking notes and as delivered, Minister Brison indicates
Strategy on Open Government
Beginning today, Canadians can go to open.canada.ca to tell us their views on what should be in the next strategy on Open Government.
We’ll also be holding in-person discussions and using the technology at our disposal to consult with Canadians in a number of cities across the country.
The details of this process are available at open.canada.ca.
The plan resulting from the consultation will be released in the summer. It will cover the full range of open government actions, from open data all the way to open science.
Plans run according to the Open Government Partnership Canada calendar, from July to June across two years (e.g. the second plan runs from July 2014 to June 2016).
A big line-up of open data related events in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
UPDATE 2015-04-23: As I live in Ottawa, I have provided some info about restaurants, and how to get around in the downtown area from the conference centre. ENDUPDATE
UPDATE 2015-06-04: The CLA conference website removed the per-day pages, and now has a single program page that doesn't provide per-session links http://www.claconference.ca/program ENDUPDATE
Some sessions that may be of interest include:
Session Title: Innovation in Canadian Libraries Session Code: INNOV Day: Wednesday June 3, 2015 12:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Session Title: Open Government – the Virtual Library, an opportunity to participate Session Code: 417-15104 Day: Wednesday June 3, 2015 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Session Title: Transparency through the Federal Lens: Open Government Initiatives at Library and Archives Canada Session Code: 417-15061 Day: Thursday June 4, 2015 10:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Session Title: Preservation and Access Through Trustworthy Digital Repositories Session Code: 417-15192 Day: Thursday 10:00 AM - 10:30 AM
Session Title: Libraries and Open Data. How Open are We ? Session Code: 417-15037 Day: Thursday June 4, 2015 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Session Title: Library and Archives Canada as a Trusted Digital Repository Session Code: 417-15560 Day: Thursday June 4, 2015 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Session Title: Open Government Speed Dating Session Code: 417-15031 Day: Friday June 5, 2015 8:30 AM - 10:30 AM
Session Title: Libraries Preparing for the Research Data Deluge ? Session Code: 417-15038 Day: Friday June 5, 2015 8:30 AM - 9:30 AM
Session Title: It’s midnight, do you know where their data is? A taxonomy of how academic researchers understand the cloud, privacy and their data Session Code: 417-15277 Day: Friday June 5, 2015 11:30 AM - 12:00 PM
can't actually do simple things, let alone grand transformation
there is a reluctance to address infrastructure
1) infrastructure is boring 2) associated with huge bureaucracy
anti-pattern: when we talk about infrastructure funder invites - future of scholarly communication but researchers don't want to think about infrastructure
funder -> money into A (infrastructure) researcher -> studying B (research) researcher tries to overlap A and B
but research projects don't actually produce sustainable infrastructure
when the grant runs out, the server goes down, and the "infrastructure" they built disappears
cloud makes this even worse (not even a hard drive in an office somewhere you can recover)
"open", "distributed", "lightweight", "framework" makes things sound reasonable
Distributed begets centralized, because otherwise it doesn't work.
People trying to punt difficult decisions about infrastructure.
If you don't acknowledge from the start that distributed will be centralized... you don't realize that you can be co-opted
minimal distributed - need many shims and adapters
trust issues
(there were) big problems with trust and ORCid (that had to be addressed)
geography is an issue because funders are national
governance should be stakeholder-governed non-discriminatory membership
transparent operations (within constraints of privacy)
organisation cannot lobby - because people fear organisations that just try to keep themselves alive
infrastructure organisation should have a living will
formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down
sustainability
time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities
goal to generate surplus - breakeven is an incredibly fragile position
goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months
revenue based on services, not data - need to ensure data remains open
revenue generation should be consistent with the mission
insurance - open source: forkability
open source open data (within constraints of privacy) available data (within constraints of privacy)
insurance policy: (with open data and open source) if you can bring the community with you (to a new location/organisation), you can win (control of your information and system)
patent non-assertion
Geoff says: if I were a funder, I would look for these principles
need to build foundation
stop asking researchers how to fund infrastructure
get people who are good at infrastructure to do infrastructure get over the fear of directly funding infrastructure
They presented a framework of the larger set of issues involved when you look at the impact of digital technologies on all of science:
The session was mainly group discussions; these are summarized in the Etherpad.
The question of what policy actions are needed to support this new scientific ecosystem is an interesting one; it's a complex system and we are still figuring out necessary pieces.
this work involves laws + portals + mindset change
EU has delivered for open science. Open access can be good for citizens, good for scientists, and good for society.
Horizon 2020 will offer 80 billion euros for research, and every resulting publication will be openly and [freely] available. Plus opening a lot more research data.
EU also calling on member states to open up their publications from their national research funding
citizens need to be informed + involved + engaged (with science)
12:20 Data-Hacking with Wikimedia Projects: Learn by Example, Including Wikipedia, WikiData and Beyond by Matt Senate @wrought and Max Klein @notconfusing
Matt and Max have clearly done a lot of thinking about how to make a project work within the WikiMedia context. The project they described is about automatically extracting information about open access content and then enriching multiple WikiMedia sites with the appropriate information.
GTEC is the Government of Canada's annual technology conference.
On October 9 there will be a two-hour session of Open Data Speed Dating. The idea is to connect data owners directly with those interested in their data.
The event builds on an experiment wiith speed dating for City of Ottawa curators organised by Open Data Ottawa (#learnhackyow in December 2012), followed by an open data speed dating event in Vancouver that Minister Clement attended.
Government of Canada employees have played a substantial leadership role in the creation of the toolkit, in its release on GitHub, and in growing the community. It's a great example of government working in a modern way.
I've embedded links to the keynotes below, as well as a Storify of the event (I didn't attend, but I watched the keynotes on YouTube).
"The hackathon will bring together technologists, data analysts, and
international development experts from across the sector to create
useful products, insights and analysis of Canada’s international aid
data."
You have to apply to attend, deadline for applications is August 8, 2013.
CanLII law, government and open data conference and hackathon
September 13th-14th, 2013
University of Ottawa
"The first day of the event will be a series of speaker panels about
different data sources and applications and the second day will be a
hackathon with various datasets and the CanLII API."
My presentation for the session "Culture Shock: Managing the Change in Publishing" at Council of Science Editors 2013 Annual Meeting. I presented the theory of how publishers can adapt to the online environment, and Cameron MacDonald, Executive Director, Canadian Science Publishing (NRC Research Press) presented the practice, the specific steps that they have taken as part of the development of CSP as a private company. CSP provided the funding for me to attend the event.
online offers a much richer communications environment than print; take advantage of channels such as video for abstracts or demonstration of complex methods
online is not just about moving your print journal experience to a screen using PDF; you are missing out on the opportunity to transform your processes and leverage the power of machine processing if all you do is post PDFs
being OF the web means adopting new ways of developing online (what is often called "agile web development") - discovery, alpha and beta - but this is really just bringing the scientific method to journal service development - hypothesis, first small experiment, larger experiment
social media demands that you be authentic, no corporate boilerplate - and the progress of science can hugely benefit from humanizing and demythologizing the work you do - expose some of the challenges of your work, the human interactions, and you may create more entry points for young people curious about science
fundamental to the journal as part of the scientific ecosystem is an emphasis on replication and retraction - realise that in the online environment we could leverage the power of the machines to automate and connect, for connecting replication (and non-replication) of papers into a coherent body of work, as well as for ensuring that retractions propagate throughout the entire system and are tracked in a standard way
another key support for replication is ensuring that the data and code associated with an article are provided alongside it - and that you consistently apply this policy, and measure yourself
as indicated on the slides, the American Economic Review has an excellent data & code policy, but they did not follow it for the 2010 quick release of the Reinhart-Rogoff paper
Twitter hashtag for the event was #cse2013 but there wasn't a lot of tweeting.
My tiny contribution to OKFestival is to arrange a small tour of the new Helsinki University City Centre Campus Library (Kaisa House, Main Library). The library just opened (September 2012).
These Helsinki University Library photographs may be used as illustration of articles concerning Helsinki University Library only in non-commercial purposes. The copyrights of the photographs cannot be transferred to a third party. When using the photos, the name of the photographer (if it has been mentioned on the site in connection with the photo) or Helsinki University as source must be mentioned.
Here is the Storify of the livetweeting from CALJ 2012. There were also some side discussions that I will capture in another post. The hashtag was #calj2012. @scilib is me.
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.
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.
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.
GTEC is a big annual IT tradeshow/conference for the federal government in Ottawa.
Tony Clement, President of the Treasury Board, did the opening keynote.
I like to tell people that when I was Industry minister, I was responsible for Canadian innovation. Now that I am President of the Treasury Board, I want to champion innovation in government.
...
a government that takes on the challenge to be a global leader in openness, transparency and security. We have already taken some steps towards making that government a reality. But there is much more to do.
...
We can transform the way we do business by harnessing IT in new ways—including
An understanding of the value of social media tools, as a way to bridge the distance between government and Canadians; and
A further commitment to all three streams of Open Government—Open Data, Open Information and Open Dialogue.
Our Government is committed to offering Canadians greater opportunities to learn about and participate in government, in the economy, and in our democratic process. They will have greater access to data from federal departments and be able to find, download and use information they want more easily.
Our Open Government activities are detailed at www.open.gc.ca, where we describe actions to strengthen Open Data, Open Information and Open Dialogue. We will post information about new activities as they are undertaken.
As announced last March, starting in 2012, all departments and agencies subject to the Access to Information Act will be required to post summaries of completed information requests on their websites.
Canada will soon have the chance to step on the world stage as a leader in Open Government. We were one of the countries to signal our intent to participate in an international Open Government Partnership.
As part of our leadership role in increasing governmental transparency and accountability, Canada has joined the international Open Government Partnership. This important initiative was launched by the United States and Brazil and aims to secure concrete commitments from other governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.
Having joined the partnership, we will be delivering an Open Government plan informed by broad consultation by March 2012.
Being part of this partnership will offer Canada a means to connect internationally through its Open Government agenda. This will be an opportunity for Canadian companies to showcase their innovations.
In the long term, open governments and economies will pay dividends for our business sector. They also stand to have an impact on Canadian society in general: increasing transparency, accountability and citizen engagement.
Notable is his specific committment to an Open Government plan for Canada by March 2012.
This is a reiteration of our existing commitment to the Open Government Partnership - the country page for Canada has a letter of intent from Minister Baird and the text "Country Action Plan coming in March 2012".
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