Science Library Pad

Canada's 2022-2024 National Action Plan on Open Government

Canada's 2022-2024 National Action Plan on Open Government is available, the main landing page is

https://open.canada.ca/en/content/national-action-plan-open-government

and the plan itself is available as a PDF.

Open Science is in commitment 1.3.2:

1.3.2 Yearly reports on progress against existing metrics that measure how science-based departments and agencies implement open science, with a focus on open access metrics and diverse types of open access, to be released in the open

Government of Canada science departments have posted the Departmental Open Science Plans that will be the basis of the yearly reporting.

Previously:
January 10, 2019  Open Science in Canada's 2018-2020 Open Government Plan

Open Data Exchange 2013 - Twitter list

NOTE: This 2013 draft blog post is being published in 2022; it may be incomplete and the information is certainly out of date.

Open Data Exchange 2013 was a one-day conference in Montreal organised by Sauvé Scholar Naomi Kincler and developer Ted Strauss.

Twitter

• Michael Lenczner @mlenc - CEO, Ajah
• James McKinney @mckinneyjames -  Technical Lead, Open North@opennorth
• Michael Roberts @michaeloroberts - Acclar@acclar & IATI
• Pete Forde (session moderator) @peteforde - Hacker Tourist
• Sébastien Pierre - fondateur, FFunction@ffunction & Montréal Ouvert
• Guillaume Ducharme @GuillaumeAQESSS - gestionnaire dans le réseau de la santé et membre du collectif Démocratie Ouverte
• Josée Plamondon @joplam - co-conceptrice, ContratsNet@ContratsNet
• Jean-Noé Landry (l’animateur de discussion) - fondateur, Montréal Ouvert et Québec Ouvert @qcouvert
• Corey Chivers @CjBayesian - PhD candidate, Biology, McGill & Montreal R User Group
• Tracey Lauriault @TraceyLauriault - Open Data advocate & Postdoctoral Fellow, Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre, Carleton University
• Petko Valtchev - Professor, Computer Science, UQAM
• Ted Strauss (moderator) @trudatted - Co-founder, Trudat
• Diane Mercier @carnetsDM - chargée de projet principale en données ouvertes@MTL_DO , Ville de Montréal
• Trina Chiasson @trinachi - InfoActive
• Christian Gendreau @christgendreau - Canadensys@Canadensys
• Trevor Bekolay @TrevorBekolay - Waterloo University
• Steve Reitano @Beautifuldata - Open Data Survey
• Anton Dubrau @ant6n - cat-bus.com
• Heri Rakotomalala @heri - MTL NewTech
• Julia Evans @b0rk - MTL all-girl hack night
• Roberto Rocha @robroc - Montreal Gazette
• Edward Ocampo-Gooding @edwardog - Open Data Ottawa

• Sauvé Scholars @SauveScholars

Departmental Open Science Plans for the Government of Canada

Government of Canada science departments are to create Open Science Plans, per the Chief Science Advisor's Roadmap for Open Science.

These plans are linked on the Government's science.gc.ca site:

Departmental Open Science Action Plans

Recognizing an open data success

Note: This is a technical examination of available COVID-19 open data.  For general information please visit your relevant local website, including:

• Canada.ca/coronavirus
• Ontario.ca/coronavirus
• OttawaPublicHealth.ca/coronavirus

Summary

Sometimes when advocating for a particular change, it can be hard to step back and recognize the progress that has been made.

COVID-19 open data in Ontario is available and is provided in a way that meets many of the goals that open data advocates had set out.  The City of Ottawa and the Province of Ontario both prominently link directly to COVID-19 open data on their dashboard pages.  The Government of Canada also links to open data, but not as prominently or consistently.  There is also an academic site providing data and code for Ottawa.  All sites provided clear licensing.

These data visualisations and open data can be considered a kind of infrastructure.  In the context of academic use of open data, particularly with the addition of open source computer code, these sites can even be considered part of a digital research infrastructure.

Goals for Open Data

There were several elements that were envisioned for open data in general:

• available
• open license
• usable - clear descriptions
• usable - machine readable
• visible, in the sense that clear links to underlying data would be provided e.g. on websites
• discoverable through search

Basically, that anyone could find it and use it.  That it would provide a usable machine-readable alternative to scraping HTML web tables or hand-extracting data from PDF or Word documents.  And also that it would be provided from every organisation at every level of government.

For sustainability, it was also hoped that open data would be part of each organisation's own internal processes:

• used by the service providers themselves

There is an additional key element I have to say wasn't strongly considered by many of the initial advocates, which is that there should be tools provided to view and work with the data without having to go in and do your own spreadsheets or write your own code:

• tools are provided for anyone to work with the data

And I would add lastly, as the community thought through the provision of tools (e.g. website visualisations):

• are the tools themselves made available for open reuse, e.g. can you access the underlying code and pipelines that are used to make the website views

These goals sometimes seemed very far off.  But with COVID-19 data in Ontario, I would consider it a success.

COVID-19 open data is available at the municipal level (e.g. City of Ottawa), at the provincial level, and federally.  (And beyond, through international aggregation sites.)

 

City of Ottawa

Ottawa COVID-19 Open Data

Ottawa's open data site is https://open.ottawa.ca/

COVID-19 open data can be found just using "COVID-19" as a search.  In this case I've also filtered for just CSV format files.

https://open.ottawa.ca/search?q=covid-19&type=csv

There are 8 datasets, including:

• COVID-19 Cases and Deaths in Ottawa
• COVID-19 Weekly Cases and Rates by Age in Ottawa (Last 6 Weeks)
• COVID-19 Reproduction Number (R(t))
• Data tables for Public COVID-19 Maps

The only one that doesn't seem to be updated frequently is "Data tables for ONS Neighbourhood COVID-19 Maps".

So the good news is the data exist, the data are being kept up-to-date, and the data are in a usable, machine-readable format.

So let's look at three more aspects:

• Is the data surfaced with tools for people to work with the data?
• Is the data clearly linked when it is used?
• Do the city's own websites/tools use the open data (and is it clear that they do so)?

Ottawa COVID-19 website

The main general use site is Ottawa Public Health - Statistics on Coronavirus 19 (COVID-19) in Ottawa, it has links to:

• Daily COVID-19 Dashboard
• COVID-19 Vaccination Dashboard
• Mapping Products
• Wastewater COVID-19 Surveillance
• Projections

The dashboard is in Microsoft Power BI, which I have seen used on a number of COVID-19 information sites.

The data pipeline is clear, but I don't think it is one that is available to the public: "Data are extracted from [the provincial Case and Contact Management (CCM) reporting system] at 3 pm daily and loaded to the dashboard the following day."  In other words, it doesn't look like the Power BI visuals are generated directly from the Ottawa open data, but instead from the provincial closed system.

Open Data Clearly and Prominently Available

However, the really good news is right below the explanation of the data source used (CCM), and before showing the dashboard, the page links directly to the open data: "The following data tables are available for download on Open Ottawa". 

So this meets a key goal, it makes the data a kind of equal, so that you easily click the links and do your own analysis whether in a spreadsheet, by writing code, or using other data analysis tools.

It's hard to overstate what a big change this is in how data is provided to the general public.  Linking to the open data at all is a big deal, but linking to it right at the top before the visualisation is a really strong and clear statement of openness.

There is a gap in that as far as I know there's no way to access the underlying Power BI setup (which incidentally generates five different pages, use the < > way down at the bottom of the Power BI frame on the page to see other Power BI pages), which means that you can see the really complicated visuals but you don't get much insight into how they're made or how you could use Power BI to make your own.

There is also a gap in that, I guess due to different cut-off time for updates, the municipal dashboard numbers are different from the provincial ones.

In terms of discoverability there are basically two pathways to the open data, one directly from Open Ottawa and one from Ottawa Public Health, but they are not quite equal.

If you land directly on Open Ottawa, you would find out it has COVID-19 open data even without a search as they are surfacing several datasets (I would guess this is automated based on traffic to the datasets, but it could be manually curated).

But you wouldn't find wastewater data, because it's on a different site https://613covid.ca/wastewater/

The wastewater site uses more of an academic format, and presents all of the data visualisations up front, before you find out below that you can "See the Methods page for more information on how the samples were collected, access to the data, and how the plots were created." 

There are some issues at this point that are more web design and user-centric design than data.  For example the Methods page is actually called model, and you can't get directly to the top of the page by clicking the Methods menu item, you have to click "Projection models" within that menu.  If you're looking for data you're more likely to pull down the Methods menu and go to "Plot data", but that won't take you directly to the open data - basically you will have to navigate around the page quite a bit before you find out that the data are actually linked under "Waterwater surveillance".  The data are made available on GitHub.

https://github.com/Big-Life-Lab/covid-19-wastewater

So not only could the wastewater site benefit from more directly and clearly linking to the GitHub data near to where it is shown in visualisations and tables, but you can't find the wastewater data at all if you start on the Open Ottawa site.  So there is a gap in integrating these different open data sources.  However, the use of GitHub does provide another path for discoverability, and adds the ability to easily share not just data but also code.

The situation for data is similar for COVID-19 projections, which can be found at

https://613covid.ca/

The source data for the projection models is the Ottawa open data, which is a good clear reuse of the data directly.  The projection models themselves are drawn from a variety of clearly linked sources.  You can see that the wastewater data is kind of added on to the models, which may be one reason for some content visibility issues in the website design.  By navigating on GitHub I can also find that the 613covid.ca projections website is generated from

https://github.com/Big-Life-Lab/Ottawa-COVID-Projection

but I don't think you can find this on the projection website itself.  It's good that the website content is on GitHub as it means pull requests can be submitted with suggested changes; however creating and submitting pull requests for a site built from GitHub is a high barrier for most users.

 

Province of Ontario

Ontario COVID-19 Open Data

The Province of Ontario's open data site is https://data.ontario.ca/

COVID-19 open data can be found just using "COVID-19" as a search.  In this case I've also filtered for just CSV format files.

https://data.ontario.ca/dataset?keywords_en=COVID-19&res_format=CSV

There are 19 dataset pages, which may link to more than one dataset per page.  For example, to find daily new cases you first go to the page

Status of COVID-19 cases in Ontario

and then select the dataset

Daily change in cases by PHU

(PHU means Public Health Unit.)

Having a full page means that a lot of explanatory and related information can be provided.  The data website itself has good functionality including the ability to preview a CSV dataset on the website itself as a grid (spreadsheet-like view), as a graph, or as a map.

https://data.ontario.ca/dataset/status-of-covid-19-cases-in-ontario/resource/8a88fe6d-d8fb-41a3-9d04-f0550a44999f

This is a great way to allow people to explore data without needing their own tools.

There is also an API available for the datasets.

https://data.ontario.ca/api/1/util/snippet/api_info.html?resource_id=8a88fe6d-d8fb-41a3-9d04-f0550a44999f

Ontario COVID-19 website

The main general use site is COVID-19 (coronavirus) in Ontario.

Right below a website display of COVID-19 cases, it has a prominent button:

Get COVID-19 data and details

and next to it,

Download the raw data from the Ontario Data Catalogue

So you have two highly visible pathways to the data.  The data and details page provides tables, maps and charts, so you can work directly with the data on the web without needing specialised tools.  At the bottom of the data and details page, it again links to the underlying data, in a "Where the numbers come from" section.  You are left a bit to navigate the data catalogue to figure out which datasets generate which charts.  The page would benefit from adding a CSV download button with each visualisation.

For example, I had to try several different data catalogue pages and examine a number of datasets before finding the new cases dataset.

Nevertheless, this is overall a really strong open data success, with multiple really clear linkages to the open data.

If you land directly on the Ontario Data Catalogue, you would find out it has COVID-19 open data even without a search as they are surfacing several datasets both under What's New (which I'm guessing is manually curated) and in the lists of Most popular and Recently updated datasets.

I will note however that their custom 2019 Novel Coronavirus group includes many more datasets than you would find just by searching COVID-19.  There is a pathway from a dataset to the group, but you would have to notice that there is a Groups option at the top of every dataset.

 

Government of Canada

Government of Canada COVID-19 Open Data

The Government of Canada open data site is https://open.canada.ca/en/open-data

COVID-19 open data can be found just using "COVID-19" as a search.  In this case, I've filtered to include CSV, JSON, GeoJSON, XLS, XLSX, XML only:

https://search.open.canada.ca/en/od/?sort=score%20desc&page=1&search_text=covid-19%20OR%20coronavirus&od-search-col=Non-Spatial|Open%20Maps&od-search-format=CSV|JSON|GEOJSON|XLS|XLSX|XML

With these filters, there are 118 datasets.

If you look at e.g. Cumulative number of COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in Canada by jurisdiction

https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/3b75a8d6-c5a9-48f9-834b-626eec16363f

you can see a clear description of the dataset and a link to download it in CSV format, but no tools to work with the dataset on the page itself.

Government of Canada COVID-19 website

The main general website is Government of Canada - Coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

A page about data can be found linked right in the top section

Current situation - COVID-19 data trends

Once we get there though, the situation is somewhat mixed.

The first link, Daily epidemiological report, takes you to many visualisations.  But it is really PDF bound, including a link to a PDF version of the page at the top, as well as (somewhat indirectly) linking to a weekly PDF summary (week of April 9, 2021 in this example).

There are some links to underlying open data, e.g. to CSV open data underlying "Current situation", but you have to be pretty sharp-eyed to spot them.

That being said, on the data trends page, there are two links in trend data that will take you to data:

• Downloadable data on COVID-19 across Canada takes you to the Government of Canada open data website, but it takes you to a single dataset, Public Health Infobase - Data on COVID-19 in Canada rather than a group or search or summary page listing all of the 100+ COVID-19 datasets.
• You can also find CSVs linked from some of the visualisations in Visual data gallery: COVID-19 graphs, charts, maps and more.

Overall I would say that while kudos is due to the Government of Canada for linking to open data, it could take lessons from the City of Ottawa and the Province of Ontario in more prominently and consistently surfacing the open data as part of its websites.

Similarly, if you land directly on the Government of Canada open data website

https://open.canada.ca/en/open-data

you get no indication that it has COVID-19 open data, unlike the prominent highlighting of COVID-19 open data on both the Ottawa and Ontario websites.

International

I will mention very briefly Our World in Data, which aggregates and then republishes international open data.  For COVID-19 specifically see

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus

There is a clear open license at the top of the web page, and there are visualisation tools (charts) provided.

Notably both the data and the code are made available on GitHub.

https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data/tree/master/public/data

Sidebar: Coding and Open Data

It is now much easier to work directly with open data in modern programming languages, particularly with CSV format data.  As an example, you can see my previous blog post about Juypyter Notebooks (Python coding) using Google Colaboratory, and a Jupyter Notebook that I created to chart new cases of COVID-19 in Ottawa is available on GitHub: https://github.com/scilib/ontario_cv19_opendata_plot

License for this blog post

This blog post is Copyright © 2021 Richard Akerman, and the text and associated images are licensed in the Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 International.

This blog post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

This license applies only to this blog post and not to the entire blog as a whole.

Open Science in US 4th Open Gov Action Plan 2019-2021

The US released its 4^th Open Government Plan on February 21, 2019.

https://open.usa.gov/assets/files/NAP4-fourth-open-government-national-action-plan.pdf

Their plan will run from 2019 to 2021.

It includes an open science commitment.

3) Provide Public Access to Federally Funded Research

Primarily through the National Science and Technology Council (Council), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy coordinates United States efforts to make the results of Federally funded scientific research more accessible and useful to the public, industry, and the scientific community. In the Council’s Subcommittee on Open Science, thirty-two United States agency funders collaborate to improve the preservation, discoverability, accessibility, and usability of Federally funded scientific research, with the aims of bolstering the reliability of that research, accelerating scientific discovery, stimulating innovation, enhancing economic growth and job creation.

In 2018, the Subcommittee on Open Science was re-chartered to promote open science principles across the Federal Government and increase public access to Federally-funded research results. The Subcommittee’s priorities include:

1. Facilitating coordination across Federal Government agencies on open science efforts;
2. Developing appropriate incentives to encourage researchers to adopt open science principles;
3. Streamlining and synchronizing agency and researcher data management practices for maximum utility to the public;
4. Collaborating with academia, researcher communities, and industry toward the development of research data standards that further open science.

As part of the Subcommittee’s objectives, it will develop a report that provides recommendations for improvements to existing Federal open access policies and continued collaboration between agencies on achieving open access objectives.

---

For more information see https://open.usa.gov/

Previously:
January 10, 2019  Open Science in Canada's 2018-2020 Open Government Plan
April 5, 2018  Open Science in France's 2018-2020 Open Government Plan

jobs - City of Ottawa seeking an open data champion

Position: Senior Data Analytics Strategist

Competition Number: 2019-EX-EN-52414133-01

Competition closing date: 2019-03-06 (March 6, 2019)

The ideal candidate for the position is an open data champion who can work with internal representatives within our organization as well as external stakeholder groups to coordinate engagement activities and contributions of data to the City of Ottawa public open data portal. The successful applicant will join our Service Transformation team and bring innovative and creative thought and workflows to evolve the open data program and further enhance the value of City data to the residents of Ottawa.

The Senior Data Analytics Strategist is responsible for developing and implementing open data strategies and workplans to manage and evolve open data activities at the City. The Strategist develops and leads an engagement strategy to find opportunities to promote open data, identify community needs for open datasets to release, and partner with external stakeholders to grow the open data community.

The Strategist is a technical leader and subject matter expert for data and analytics including open data governance and data management practices.

Apply through the City of Ottawa website: https://ottawa.ca/cgi-bin/jobs.pl?id=2019-EX-EN-52414133-01

Feedback requested on Canada's draft 2018-2020 Open Gov Plan

The Government of Canada has released its final draft 4th Plan on Open Government 2018-2020, as part of its participation in the Open Government Partnership (OGP).  The plan has 10 draft commitments, which are available in Google Docs for commenting:

1. User-friendly open government
2. Financial transparency and accountability
3. Corporate transparency
4. Digital government and services
5. Open science
6. Healthy democracy
7. Access to Information
8. Feminist and inclusive open government
9. Reconciliation and open government
10. Leadership and collaboration

Feedback can also be provided via email to [email protected]

The Open Science commitment has four milestones:

• Pilot an open science portal to provide access to open access publications from federal scientists
• [Launch an online directory of National Research Council Canada scientists]
• Promote open science and actively solicit feedback on stakeholder needs for open data and open science
• Measure the Government of Canada’s progress in implementing open science, and the benefits open science can provide to Canadians

The deadline for feedback is August 13, 2018.

The 2016-2018 Open Government Plan, which also included an Open Science commitment, is now completed.

Twitter:

• @opengovcan
• #opengovcan

Disclaimer: I am employed by the Government of Canada to work on Open Science.

Provide feedback on the Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy

The three federal research funding agencies—the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (the agencies)—have developed a draft Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy, which aims to support Canadian research excellence by fostering sound digital data management and data stewardship practices.

feedback on the draft policy is requested by August 31, 2018

Feedback can be sent electronically to any of the following email addresses:

SSHRC:

[email protected]

NSERC:

[email protected]

CIHR:

[email protected]

Open Science in France's 2018-2020 Open Government Plan

France has released its final 2018-2020 National Action Plan for the Open Government Partnership: Plan d'action national pour la France (PDF).  You can read a summary of the launch: #OpenGov #OpenParliament : les plans d’action du Gouvernement et de l’Assemblée nationale pour une action publique transparente et collaborative ont été lancés.

The plan includes an Open Science commitment.

Engagement 18
Construire un écosystème de la « science ouverte »
pp. 57-59

Il vise à construire un écosystème dans lequel la science sera plus cumulative, plus fortement étayée par des données, plus transparente, plus intègre, plus rapide et d’accès plus universel.

Actions (rough translation):

• Create an Open Science Committee - 2018
• Quantitative monitoring of open access for national scientific literature - 2019
• Transparent monitoring/reporting of article processing charges (APCs) - 2020
• Transparent monitoring/reporting of expenditures on electronic acquisitions for university libraries - 2018
• Open data on the financing of research projects – 2019
• National use of ORCID identifiers for scientific researchers – 2018 or 2019
• Accelerate the development of the national open access repository HAL ( https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ )
• Enrich the scanR ( https://scanr.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/ ) and Isidore ( https://www.rechercheisidore.fr/ ) science search engines – 2018 to 2020
• Communicate with the scientific community about the implications of the loi numérique ( https://www.economie.gouv.fr/republique-numerique ) for open access and open data – 2018 or 2019
• With consultation, recommend a policy for open data associated with (peer-reviewed journal) articles and for data papers – no date specified
• Progressively put in place research data management plans as a requirement in project applications, and encourage open data from funded projects – 2019

Chan Zuckerberg Open Science

Information about Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) Science can be found at

https://chanzuckerberg.com/science

In particular, under "Our Approach to Supporting Projects", there is context about the CZI perspective on Open Science

https://chanzuckerberg.com/science#Approach

• Intellectual Property Should we build an IP portfolio, or should IP be generated by a CZI-supported investigator or research project, our policy is that the IP should be made freely available for academic and noncommercial use. Where IP is developed together with other organizations, we will promote non-exclusive licensing of technologies so that they have the broadest reach and impact.
• Data sharing and software We are deeply committed to developing and using platforms that disseminate data openly and freely. We are also committed to releasing software under maximally permissive open-source licenses, and developing software collaboratively in the open through sites like GitHub. We are committed to the long-term sustainability of our projects – when needed, we will explore alternative ways to ensure data access through permanent archives. Also when needed, we will work with regulatory groups to ensure that data requiring protection or controlled access are handled in a controlled and proper way in agreement with national and international standards.
• Publication We support full publication without conditions or restrictions on academic and publication freedom. We strongly encourage, and in some cases, may require, researchers to deposit manuscripts as preprints before peer review to increase access to research findings and to communicate results more quickly.

There is some additional text in the RFA for the Neurodegeneration Challenge Network, in the Collaboration and Open Science section

CZI supports open science values and principles. To accelerate scientific discovery and collaboration and rapid dissemination, CZI supports a consent, sharing, and publication policy for open and rapid dissemination of research results and a policy for software development that maximizes accessibility, reuse, and shared development.

You can also watch Dr. Cori  Bargmann, the President of Chan Zuckerberg Science, present a 2018 AAAS plenary entitled Accelerating Biomedical Research

http://players.brightcove.net/53038991001/Byx2STOH0_default/index.html?videoId=5736045412001

Previously:
April 25, 2017  Chan Zuckerberg - Meta and preprints

SGC Open Notebook Science - January 2018

On January 19, 2018 the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) launched an initiative for Open Notebook Science at an event supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Wellcome Trust.

Open notebook science is basically the concept that researchers publish their research publicly as they conduct it, with all the challenges and successes along the way.  You can read more in Wikipedia - Open notebook science.

An interesting aspect of the particular model of open notebook science being employed by SGC is the combination of described datasets uploaded to the SGC Open Notebooks community in Zenodo, with links from more general descriptions of activity in a blog platform hosted by SGC.

There was coverage related to the event in various venues:

• eLife - Open notebooks galore: The Structural Genomics Consortium - Jan 19, 2018
• University of Toronto news - Open science: University of Toronto researchers to publish lab notes in real time - January 19, 2018
• Springer Nature - Research Data - Data Dialogues - Open Lab Notebooks to increase impact and accelerate discovery - by Matthieu Schapira - Jan 26, 2018

UPDATE 2018-02-19: Rachel Harding and Aled Edwards discussed open notebook science before the event on the Colper Science Podcast.  ENDUPDATE

Twitter hashtag was #SGCOpenNotebooks

Webcast is available at https://youtu.be/vxoxKVUWsUY

Presentations (including mine) linked in the agenda below.  Note that due to technical difficulties the first few slides of my presentation don't show in the webcast.

09:00 - 09:10	Matthieu Schapira, PI, SGC - Twitter @mattschap Introductory remarks
Session 1 – Chair: Matthieu Schapira
09:10 - 09:30	Aled Edwards, Director, SGC - Twitter @AledMEdwards Scientists and society: striking a new bargain (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158763)
09:30 - 10:30	SGC Extreme Open Science Unit: Carla Alamillo, David Dilworth, Genna Luciani, Heng Zhang, Jolene Ho, Jon Fu Wong, Liz Brown, Mandeep Man, Megha Abbey, Nirav Kapadia, Roslin Adamson, Rachel Harding. Scientific project outlines (5 minutes each) (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158769)
10:30 - 11:00	Rachel Harding, PDF, SGC and open notebook trailblazer - Twitter @labscribbles 2 Years of Open Notebooking; lessons learnt from Labscribbles (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1155846)
11:00 - 11:15	Coffee Break
Session 2 – Chair: Arij Al Chawaf, Director SGC Strategic Alliances - Twitter @TweetsFromArij
11:15 - 11:45	David Carr, Open Research Program Manager, The Wellcome Trust, UK Open Research – a funder perspective (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158767)
11:45 - 12:15	Richard Akerman, Senior Policy Analyst, Environment and Climate Change Canada - Twitter @scilib Open Science in the Government of Canada (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1160435) - also available on Slideshare - starts at 2h35m into webcast on YouTube
12:15 - 12:45	Kelsey Merkley, Open Program Designer, Creative Commons - Twitter @bella_velo Creative Commons CC-BY: opportunities for open (in Zenodo, doi:10.5281/zenodo.1158765)

Previously:
September 21, 2007  Wired on open data
August 9, 2007  the peer review logo
June 28, 2007  thinking about open science - me being sceptical

an open science diagram

As part of working in the open, here is a draft diagram intended to set the Government of Canada federal open by default pilot project in the context of potential open science activities.

diagram Copyright © 2017 Government of Canada, available for reuse under the Open Government License

This diagram is part of a larger briefing on how the federal open by default pilot project, which provides public access to draft government documents, could be used in an open science context.

Your thoughts about this representation and about draft documents in an open science context are appreciated.  You can leave a comment or email [email protected]

I take no credit for the diagram (I am terrible at graphics).  It is the work of the rest of the open science team at Environment and Climate Change Canada, with particular credit to Amanda McLeod.

The government does not currently have activities in all of the areas in the diagram above.  For more about the government's open science activities, please see the Open Science commitment in the 2016-2018 Plan to the Open Government Partnership.

Note: Crossposted to Medium https://medium.com/@scilib/an-open-science-diagram-3c3671478b7c

Chan Zuckerberg - Meta and preprints

The Chan Zuckerberg initiative will be funding science in various areas, with a particular focus on diseases.

To accelerate this progress, we will bring scientists and engineers together in new ways, create computational and experimental tools to empower the scientific community and build a movement to support basic science research.

from https://chanzuckerberg.com/initiatives/

Chan Zuckerberg has launched with an initial US$3 billion commitment to basic research, as reported in Inside Philanthropy.

There is a particular emphasis on funding high-risk ideas:

Forty-seven investigators will receive up to US$1.5 million each in the next five years from the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a partnership between the couple’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and three universities: Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco. Together, the biohub grants announced on 8 February total more than $50 million.

“We told researchers, give us your riskiest ideas,” says biohub co-leader Stephen Quake, a bioengineer at Stanford.

from Nature - 'Riskiest ideas' win $50 million from Chan Zuckerberg Biohub - February 8, 2017

Several projects and technologies have been announced, including:

Chan Zuckerberg Biohub - this appears to be the central focus for the science activities

Meta - a science search engine that Chan Zuckerberg purchased and has promised to make available to the public for free.  It is planned it will become a sort of AI analysis tool for the science literature.

There is no open science policy statement available that I can find on any of the Chan Zuckerberg sites.  There is apparently a requirement to post preprints at time of submission.

The biohub investigators must post their manuscripts on open-access preprint servers, such as the arXiv, as soon as they submit the paper to a peer-reviewed journal. But researchers are permitted to file for patents, which would be owned jointly by the biohub and the scientists’ home institution.

from Nature - 'Riskiest ideas' win $50 million from Chan Zuckerberg Biohub - February 8, 2017

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Manager of Computational Biology, Jeremy Freeman, has made some statements about making data and code available.

Will all your research be peer-reviewed, published in journals and published for all to see?
We are absolutely committed to open dissemination of data and code and knowledge; that’s something I have been committed to all the time I’ve been a scientist.

The Guardian - Mark Zuckerberg’s man in the lab: ‘I want science to happen faster’ - March 5, 2017

Scientific research is still shared using a system developed more than a hundred years ago: the academic paper. “That’s how we disseminate knowledge, it’s a PDF document,” Freeman said. The data, the code and the interactive elements of the research should all be interactive, he argued. “There’s an obvious need to modernise and scale-up the technology we’re using,” Freeman said.

Wired - Meet the man tasked with speeding-up science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative - March 12, 2017

So for the moment it looks like preprints, open code (open source?) and open data.  But still not clear about open access.

A unified position statement from Chan Zuckerberg on their website about their open science approach would provide some clarity.  This could be a page along the lines of the Gates Foundation Open Access Policy.

UPDATE 2017-04-26: An announcement today from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) that Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will be providing funding for the development and expansion of the bioRxiv preprints server and that "All software developed through this collaboration will be made available as open source."

Nature has a bit more information in BioRxiv preprint server gets cash boost from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, including the possibility of better enabling bioRxiv for text mining and connecting it to Meta.

Previously:
February 17, 2017  Many preprint services

LIGO Open Science Center as a model for communication and engagement

I am really impressed with the work that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration has done to demonstrate the possibilities of open science communication and engagement.

The LIGO Open Science Center includes the following elements:

• data, including usage notes and data releases with accompanying documents
• some data releases have associated DOIs, e.g. event GW150914 data has doi:10.7935/K5MW2F23
• tutorials on how to work with the data, including a variety of cloud and downloadable software options
• some of the tutorials are Jupyter (iPython) notebooks, which combine data and code
• a way to query and extract time-based metadata (timeline) including an offer to host data
• a webservice to query and extract data (MySources)
• software examples and downloadable packages
• examples of data analysis projects including
  an online course
• list of publications with links to both final publications and preprints, plus (sometimes) science summaries
• the science summaries are sometimes even available in multiple languages

The one thing that I have been unable to find is a clear license for data use, although they do provide guidance on how to cite data that you use.

Going beyond the Open Science Center, they have many other channels of communication and engagement.

They did a Reddit AMA on the 2nd gravitational wave detection and they have a running crowdsourcing/citizen science project on Zooniverse called Gravity Spy.  As well there is a page listing just the papers related to the detection events; the page indicates open access papers clearly, but doesn't link to preprints.

They also have the usual social media, including YouTube with documentaries, public talks, podcasts, panels, and classes.

Taken all together, this provides a really good example of the scope that open science covers - it's not just releasing data, it's releasing accompanying software, tutorials, and analysis examples, as well as providing summaries of the science and reaching out through many different channels to engage the public.  (And this is just at the publication stage of the research lifecycle; there are many other stages at which open science applies.)

You can't just release the data, you have to also teach the data.  You can't just release the science, you have to also explain the science.

All of these activities require a whole set of skills in software, websites, plain language explanation and public engagement, beyond just the scientific expertise in and of itself.

---

If we take the observation of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger (event GW150914) as an example, you can, just from the LIGO site (not counting the multiple news reports available)

• start with a step-by-step explanation of LIGO and gravitational waves
• read a science summary (in English, French, Chinese, German, Japanese and Spanish)
• read the full scientific paper as it is open access with a CC-BY license
• read the preprint that was posted to arXiv (although in this case it appears likely the preprint and full paper are the same, as they're from the same day)
• see what other LIGO documents are related to the full scientific paper
• access the data including being able to cite the data using a DOI, and learn how to work with the data using the Jupyter notebook software tutorials

Open Science in Canada's 2016-2018 Open Government Plan

Following a consultation, the final version of Canada's 2016-2018 Open Government Plan for the Open Government Partnership has been released.

http://open.canada.ca/en/content/third-biennial-plan-open-government-partnership

This includes a commitment on open science, the second Canadian plan to have such a commitment.

Commitment 14: Increase Openness of Federal Science Activities (Open Science)

How will it be done:

Horizontal implementation of the federal open science initiative began in 2012. Under the new Plan, the Government of Canada wants to build on past work by taking bold steps to make government-funded science open and transparent to Canadians. Reflecting the importance of citizen engagement and collaboration, deliverables will focus on increasing the accessibility of government science, helping to ensure Canadians are informed of opportunities to engage in federal science and technology (S&T) activities, and exploring ways to enhance the impact of government data and information.

Underscoring the Government’s commitment to open science at the recent meeting of G7 Science and Technology Ministers, Canada supported a recommendation to establish an international working group on open science. This group would focus on sharing open science policies, exploring supportive incentive structures, and identifying good practices for promoting increased access to the results of publicly funded research, including scientific data and publications.

Milestones:

Science-based Departments and Agencies

• Create a Chief Science Officer mandated to ensure that government science is fully available to the public, that scientists are able to speak freely about their work, and that scientific analyses are considered when the Government makes decisions.  
• Increase the public availability of data and publications produced from federal Science and Technology (S&T) activities.
• Increase engagement with Canadians on federal S&T activities, including, as appropriate:
  • Enhanced communication of scientific participation opportunities in support of federal S&T activities; and
  • Targeted consultations on best practices for increasing the impact of federal S&T activities.
• Develop metrics to track collective federal progress on open science activities.

Granting Councils and Grants and Contributions

• Develop and implement an open access policy for scientific research funded through grants and contributions.
• Work toward the development of policies on digital data management for research funded through the Granting Councils.

Lead Departments:

Environment and Climate Change Canada; Innovation, Science, and Economic Development

Disclaimer: I work on the open science commitment.

See the previous open science commitment C.1 in the 2014-2016 Open Government Action Plan.

Previously:
June 16, 2016  consultation on draft 2016-2018 Open Gov Action Plan for Canada

 

consultation on draft 2016-2018 Open Gov Action Plan for Canada

The Government has launched the final consultation phase on the 2016-2018 Open Government Action Plan, Canada's third plan for the international Open Government Partnership.

http://open.canada.ca/en/consultations/canadas-new-plan-open-government-2016-2018

You can provide feedback to the draft plan by commenting on the page or by emailing [email protected]

UPDATE: Consultation closes June 30, 2016.  ENDUPDATE

It includes an open science commitment, building on the 2014-2016 commitment.

2016-2018 Commitment 14: Increase Openness of Federal Science Activities (Open Science)

Disclaimer: I work on the open science commitment.

Twitter:

• @TBS_Canada
• #opengovcan

Previous Plans

• Open Government Action Plan 2012-2014 (first plan)
• Open Government Action Plan 2014-2016 (second plan)
• 2014-2016 open science commitment

Plans run according to the Open Government Partnership Canada calendar, from July to June across two years (e.g. the third plan will run from approximately July 2016 to June 2018).

Previously:
April 5, 2016  Open Government in Canada - 2016 consultations and Google Hangout
February 2, 2016  Canada - Open Science 2014-2015 assessment for OGP/OGAP

immediate open access as the default by 2020 - European Council

The European Council - Competitiveness Council met May 26-27, 2016 with a two hour discussion about open science on the 27th.

Their conclusions on "The transition towards an Open Science system" (document 9526/16) have been published, of which particularly notable are

12. AGREES to further promote the mainstreaming of open access to scientific publications by

continuing to support a transition to immediate open access as the default by 2020, using the

various models possible and in a cost-effective way, without embargoes or with as short as

possible embargoes, and without financial and legal barriers, taking into account the diversity

in research systems and disciplines, and that open access to scientific publications should be

achieved in full observance of the principle that no researcher should be prevented from

publishing; ...

 

14. UNDERLINES that research data originating from publicly funded research projects could be

considered as a public good, and ENCOURAGES the Member States, the Commission and

stakeholders to set optimal reuse of research data as the point of departure, whilst recognising

the needs for different access regimes because of Intellectual Property Rights, personal data

protection and confidentiality, security concerns, as well as global economic competitiveness

and other legitimate interests. Therefore, the underlying principle for the optimal reuse of

research data should be: “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”.

A high-level summary of the discussion and conclusions can be found on pages 12-13 of document 9357/16, Outcome of the Council Meeting, including

The Commission is deploying efforts on the development of a European Open Science Agenda that will include three main lines of action:
– The setting up of an Open Science Policy Platform as a high-level expert group focusing on framework conditions for an open science-friendly environment
– The promotion of open access for the results of scientific research and underlying data, mainly with a pilot project on open research data under the Horizon 2020 research programme
– The setting of standards for the management, interoperability and quality of scientific data to progress towards a European Open Science Cloud

There is also a summary in the main results

Chairing the Council, Sander Dekker, State Secretary of Education, Culture and Science of the Netherlands, made the following statement: "Open Science is a topic which is very dear to our hearts. During the Netherlands presidency, we have aimed at bringing Europe to the forefront of global change and at leading the transition to a new way of doing research and science based on openness, big data and cloud computing. ...

and in the press release "All European scientific articles to be freely accessible by 2020"

Netherlands State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science Sander Dekker ... "The time for talking about open access is now past. With these agreements, we are going to achieve it in practice." ...

From 2020, all scientific publications on the results of publicly funded research must be freely available. It also must be [possible] to optimally reuse research data. To achieve that, the data must be made accessible, unless there are well-founded reasons for not doing so, for example intellectual property rights or security or privacy issues.

and there is a brief summary video for the entire meeting.

The membership of the Open Science Policy Platform was also announced.  Feedback from civil society indicates some dissatisfaction that the membership is primarily institutional.

The video of the two-hour discussion is available, with key statements indicated in the sidebar (under "Live updates").  Click on "Open Science System" on the video page to go directly to the specific session, or go to 23:34 into the video (it is supposed to be possible to make a link to part of the webcast but it doesn't seem to be working).

Twitter and Hashtags

• #COMPET
• @EUCouncil
• @EU2016NL
• @SanderDekker
• @Moedas
• #openscience

Previously:
April 20, 2016  Open Science Cloud launched by European Commission

Open Science Cloud launched by European Commission

On April 19, 2016 the European Commission announced many initiatives under the umbrella of “Digitise Europe”.  Some are related to open science.

• Under European Cloud Initiative
• As of 2016: creating a European Open Science Cloud
• 2017: opening up by default all scientific data produced by future projects under the €77 billion Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
• The public and private investment needed to implement the European Cloud Initiative is estimated at €6.7 billion. The Commission estimates that, overall, €2 billion in Horizon 2020 funding will be allocated to the European Cloud initiative. The estimation of the required additional public and private investment is €4.7 billion in the period of 5 years.

Previously open scientific data was just a pilot in Horizon 2020, now it will become a requirement.

This is only one element of the larger open science initiative https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=home

The next item coming from the open science initiative will be the Open Science Policy Platform which will support policy formulation and implementation https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=open-science-policy-platform

It is also worth noting that on the Open Access side, the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Call_for_Action_on_Open_Science was issued as part of an Open Science Conference April 4-5, 2016 and is expected to go to the Competitiveness Council on May 27, 2016.  It currently calls for 100% open access in Europe by 2020.

BACKGROUND

• Press Release - European Cloud Initiative http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1408_en.htm
• Full Communication (13 pages) – European Cloud Initiative http://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/document.cfm?doc_id=15266
• Home page – European Cloud Initiative https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/european-cloud-initiative
• Home page – European Open Science Cloud https://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/index.cfm?pg=open-science-cloud

Videos

• Günther OETTINGER, Member of the EC in charge of Digital Economy and Society http://ec.europa.eu/avservices/video/player.cfm?ref=I119779
• Carlos MOEDAS, Member of the EC in charge of Research, Science and Innovation http://ec.europa.eu/avservices/video/player.cfm?ref=I119778
• Q&A http://ec.europa.eu/avservices/video/player.cfm?ref=I119780

Twitter and Hashtags

• #DigitiseEU
• #OpenScience
• @OpenAccessEC
• @ICTscienceEU
• @DSMeu (Digital Single Market)
• @EU_eGov
• @Moedas
• @GOettingerEU

 

Open Government in Canada - 2016 consultations and Google Hangout

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).

Google Hangout

• Wednesday April 6, 2016 at 1pm Eastern (13h)
• hashtag #OpenGovCan
• Twitter @TBS_Canada
• check open.canada.ca for more information

UPDATE 2016-04-10: Video of the 30 minute Hangout is available.

UPDATE 2016-04-11: Transcript of the Hangout will be posted to http://open.canada.ca/en/consultations/hangout160406  ENDUPDATE

Consultations

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

Help shape Canada’s Action Plan on Open Government 2016–18

You can sort ideas by date, most popular, and most commented, but there aren't separate URLs for those options.

There will also be in-person consultations and you can email a detailed submission to [email protected]

The draft plan will be online in June 2016 for consultation.

Separately, from May 1 to July 1, 2016 there will be online and in-person consultations about the Access to Information Act.

Budget

In Chapter 7 Open and Transparent Government of Budget 2016,

Expanding Open Data Initiatives

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

https://youtu.be/HS9JXTj4ZBw?t=41m40s

The speaking notes are available, along with a news release.

The Action Plan 2016-2018

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.

Previous Plans

• Open Government Action Plan 2012-2014 (first plan)
• Open Government Action Plan 2014-2016 (second plan)

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).

Previously:
February 2, 2016  Canada - Open Science 2014-2015 assessment for OGP/OGAP
November 6, 2014  Open Science in Canada's 2nd Open Gov Plan

Disclaimer: I work on the Open Science commitment of Action Plan 2014-2016.

Data archiving and sharing - Le partage du savoir - Dominique Roche - Les années lumière

Canada's national French language public radio Radio-Canada has a science show, Les années lumière.

Every episode has some standard segments, including Doc / Post-Doc, which is an interview with a doctoral or post-doctoral researcher.

For February 21, 2016 the researcher was Dominique Roche, specifically about his research on Policies and practices surrounding data archiving and sharing.

You can see his academic home page at Université de Neuchâtel: http://www2.unine.ch/ethol/lang/en_GB/dominique_roche

and his Twitter is @dom_roche

Relevant papers on this topic are:

• Data deposition: Fees could damage public data archives - Nature 502, 171 (10 October 2013) - doi:10.1038/502171a - Published online 09 October 2013 (closed access)
• Troubleshooting Public Data Archiving: Suggestions to Increase Participation - Roche DG, Lanfear R, Binning SA, Haff TM, Schwanz LE, Cain KE, et al. (2014) Troubleshooting Public Data Archiving: Suggestions to Increase Participation. PLoS Biol 12(1): e1001779. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001779
• Public Data Archiving in Ecology and Evolution: How Well Are We Doing? - Roche DG, Kruuk LEB, Lanfear R, Binning SA (2015) Public Data Archiving in Ecology and Evolution: How Well Are We Doing? PLoS Biol 13(11): e1002295. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002295

You can visit the segment page for the Feb 21, 2016 Doc / Post-Doc on Roche, but the JavaScript popup audio player may cause problems depending how your system is set up.

Here is a direct link to a web page that should take you to the specific audio segment, but it requires Flash for playback on desktop computers.

An easier option may be to go to the audio segment in the podcast.  It runs from approximately 36:02 to approx. 43:13.

• direct MP3 link
• general podcast feed link (you'll have to pick the right episode)
• iTunes general podcast link (you'll have to pick the right episode)
• iTunes specific episode podcast link (note that this doesn't always work)

Open Data Day Ottawa 2016

Open Data Ottawa is having a meetup for the 6th International Open Data Day

Saturday March 5, 2016

1:30pm to 4:30pm

register at http://www.meetup.com/Open-Data-Ottawa/events/228809644/

Canada - Open Science 2014-2015 assessment for OGP/OGAP

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

Canada's second Open Government Action Plan (OGAP) 2014-2016, released November 2014, contains an Open Science commitment.

The OGP requires yearly self-assessment and independent assessment reports.

Both reports have now been released.  The commenting period for the self-assessment closed January 18, 2016, but the commenting period for the independent assessment just opened today (February 2, 2016).

• Canada - 2014-2015 independent assessment for public comment (PDF) - Open Science is on pages 43-46
• Canada - Open Science 2014-2015 self-assessment
• Canada - Open Science commitment in OGAP 2014-2016
• Canada - Open Government Action Plan 2014-2016

UPDATE 2016-02-03: To comment on Canada's 2015 independent assessment, use the web form or email [email protected] ENDUPDATE

Disclaimer: I work on the Open Science commitment.

Twitter

• Open Government Partnership @opengovpart
• Open Government Partnership Independent Reporting Mechanism @OGP_IRM

Websites

• Canada - Open Government http://open.canada.ca/en/about-open-government
• OGP - Canada http://www.opengovpartnership.org/country/canada/
• OGP - Canada - Action Plans
• OGP - Canada - Self-Assessments
• OGP - Canada - independent assessments
• OGP - Canada - Calendar (PDF)
• OGP - all independent assessment reports

 

Previously:
November 6, 2014  Open Science in Canada's 2nd Open Gov Plan

Related articles

Comment on Canada's Mid-term Self-assessment on Open Government Action Plan 2014-16

Ottawa Minecraft map

The City of Ottawa Open Data initiative has released a Minecraft map of the city

geoOttaWOW: A Minecraft world of the City of Ottawa

However you have to know a few things that aren't really explained:

• This is a really big map which means it is slow to load and will tax your computer system.  It may crash on some older systems, particularly if you try to move around very quickly.
• The starting point (world spawn point) is, for some reason, currently set to near the Rideau river, Old Ottawa South (Glengarry & Onslow).
• You can teleport to other locations but you have to know the coordinates.

Fortunately some locations are listed under the Showcase link

Spawn point tp -5.5 129 -2.5

is near the Rideau river, Old Ottawa South (Glengarry & Onslow)

Parliament: tp -2266 139 -2061

Exp. Farm traffic circle tp -2851 163 1744

What does this mean?

As this is a Creative map with Cheats turned on, you can teleport, using the /tp command.

To get to Parliament Hill, just type

/tp -2266 139 -2061

Otherwise, since you spawn in a forest without any familiar landmarks, and Ottawa is very big, you may wander around for a long time before finding anything.

Parliament (Centre Block) looks like this

(Despite a CBC article which may make you think you are looking for a blue-and-white castle.)

I don't know the details of how the map was generated, but I'm guessing mostly through an export from Ottawa's Geographic Information System (GIS).  This would give the shapes of the major buildings (if you live in an apartment tower you will probably see it, if you live in a single-family detached house you will just see your lot full of grass).  The generator has some eccentric parameters set, so you will find water and lava in various places, including flowing down buildings.

It is cool to wander around Ottawa with animals grazing on Parliament Hill and more than the usual number of zombies wandering around Centretown.

The city really should set the world spawn to Parliament Hill though.  But since it's open data you can modify it and share the modifications as you wish.

Comment on Canada's Mid-term Self-assessment on Open Government Action Plan 2014-16

Canada is a member of the Open Government Partnership, and follows a two-year cycle running from July to June (2014-2016, 2016-2018 etc.) Included in the cycle is a mid-term assessment after the first year of the National Action Plan (NAP) and a final assessment after the second and final year. Assessment is composed of internal self-assessment and a third-party Independent Reporting Mechanism (IRM).

Canada has completed the first year of its second Action Plan (2014-2016) and so the internal self-assessment as of June 2015 is now available online. Feedback will be open online until Monday January 18, 2016.

The plan consists of a number of commitments, including Open Science. You can comment on the plan as a whole, or on individual commitments. You can also comment by sending an email to [email protected]

Based on the OGP calendar, the next Canadian National Action Plan (2016-2018) should be available in the July 2016 timeframe.

Disclaimer: I work on the Open Science commitment.

2015 Ministerial Mandate Letters - open data

Canada (federal level)

2015 Ministerial Mandate Letters

For the Canadian federal Mandate Letters, the starting paragraphs are (on a quick scan) all the same (with adjustments to address each Minister), including

We have also committed to set a higher bar for openness and transparency in government.  It is time to shine more light on government to ensure it remains focused on the people it serves.  Government and its information should be open by default.

Two Mandate Letters mention open data (on a quick scan).

The Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development:

• Improve the quality of publicly available data in Canada.  This will require working with Statistics Canada, the President of the Treasury Board and other departments and agencies to develop an Open Data initiative that would consider big data and make more of the data paid for by Canadians available to the public.

The President of the Treasury Board:

• Take a leadership role to review policies to improve the use of evidence and data in program innovation and evaluation, more open data, and a more modern approach to comptrollership.
• Accelerate and expand open data initiatives and make government data available digitally, so that Canadians can easily access and use it.

This is somewhat different from the mandate to the Minister of Science, which includes "Create a Chief Science Officer mandated to ensure that government science is fully available to the public".