Science Library Pad

Human Library at Ottawa Public Library

2012-01-25T07:29:11-05:00

On January 28, 2012 the Ottawa Public Library will provide a range of people that can be "checked out" of the library for 20 minutes. Different branches have different people. There is also a partnership with the CBC and the War Museum. A few examples:

At the War Museum

No. 2 Special Wireless –Second World War

Born in Lachine, Québec and of Russian descent, Hyman Yanofsky joined the Canadian army to fight Hitler. His job was to intercept messages from the enemy as he travelled through Europe.

At the Stittsville branch

Farmer
Kylah Dobson grows heritage fruits and vegetables on land that her family has farmed for six generations. She and her husband farm off-the-grid, depending on the sun to power Rainbow Heritage Garden.

At the Nepean Centrepointe Branch

Blind Octogenarian

A doctor diagnosed Theresa Dupuis with acute glaucoma just before Christmas 1990. He told her she'd go blind within 10 years. Theresa now considers her vision loss as a gift and swears she wouldn't take her sight back if offered to her. The octogenarian loves cross-country skiing, snow-shoeing, kayaking, yoga and meditation.

CBC TV News Anchor

Adrian Harewood is the co-host of CBC News Ottawa Monday to Friday starting at 5 p.m, and host of the late night news each weeknight at 10:55 p.m. He grew up in Ottawa. Adrian first got the broadcasting bug when he volunteered at campus stations CHUO and CKCU here. He has filled in as host on such well-known programs as As It Happens and Sounds Like Canada.

Ottawa Public Library - Human Library

Saturday, January 28, 2012 11:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.

The library tweets at @opl_bpo The War Museum is on Twitter @CanWarMuseum

The hashtag is #HLott

More OC Transpo real-time open data news

2012-01-24T21:28:35-05:00

Some great ongoing coverage of the reluctance of Ottawa's transit agency, OC Transpo, to release real-time bus position information despite city policy, strong demands from Councillors, and insistence from citizens.

Developers

"I think in general OC Transpo is going to underestimate the capacity of the developer community to work together and solve problems," said Jonathan Rudenberg, who wrote a bus-location app using OC Transpo data that won a "people's choice" award in the city's application contest last year.

Ottawa Citizen - Criticism of route apps disputed - by David Reevely (@davidreevely) - January 20, 2012

You can find Jonathan on Twitter @titanous and information about his app Where is my bus? is available on the Apps4Ottawa contest site.

Developer John Gill (@swfiua) is so frustrated that he now wants to develop an app that uses crowdsourced position data from GPS-enabled smartphones, without using OC Transpo data at all.

Councillors

OC Transpo should open its bus-location data to outside programmers the same day it launches its own application to tell riders when their buses are due, says Councillor Stephen Blais, and he intends to present a motion to the city’s transit commission at its next meeting ... to force the company to do it.

Ottawa Citizen - Councillor determined to have OC Transpo bus-location data opened to outside programmers - by David Reevely - January 23, 2012

Councillor Blais tweets @StephenBlais and his political page on Facebook is http://www.facebook.com/StephenBlaisOrleans

Blog coverage

History

We've been fighting this fight for over a year. Here's David Reevely reporting February 14, 2011: The open-data battle continues with OC Transpo.

Previously
January 19, 2012 In the news: Fight for Ottawa realtime transit open data
January 18, 2012 OC Transpo would rather have ads than open data

In the news: Fight for Ottawa realtime transit open data

2012-01-19T03:29:47-05:00

Extensive reporting on the January 18, 2012 Transit Committee meeting in Ottawa, where the transit agency OC Transpo's update on open data was that they didn't want to release it.

OC Transpo runs an entirely bus-based transit network. The main issue at hand is getting the agency to release the realtime position data, from GPS systems already installed (or in some cases soon-to-be installed) on the buses. OC Transpo does provide standard static transit schedule data in GTFS format, but the realities of road conditions (particularly in winter) mean that the official schedule often doesn't match the actual bus arrival times.

Of particular concern were OC Transpo's assertions that it was difficult and unwise to release the realtime data, an unusual position considering that Toronto and Winnipeg already provide this type of data.

Vehicle locations and next vehicle arrival predictions are in real-time.

toronto.ca/open - Data Catalogue » TTC Real-Time Next Vehicle Arrival (NVAS)

a real-time picture of what is currently happening on the streets, with information about our city-wide service status, which individual buses are delayed and by how much, the estimated arrival times of buses at stops, and more.

Winnipeg Transit's Open Data Web Service - API Overview

News Coverage

Ottawa Citizen - Transpo opposes live data release on buses - by David Reevely (@davidreevely)
Ottawa Citizen - Who's driving this bus? Not the public, apparently, as city cuts taxpayers off from right to information - by Joanne Chianello (@jchianello)
Metro News Ottawa - OC Transpo recommends reneging on open data promise - by Jessica Smith
580 CFRA News - Councillors Grill Mercier over Open Data for OC Transpo GPS Info - by Stephanie Kinsella with Kristi Soble
Open File Ottawa - Alain Mercier faces tough questions over OC Transpo data release - by Trevor Pritchard (Disclaimer: uses substantial amount of information from my previous blog post about the TC meeting)
CBC News - OC Transpo bus data all about the money
YourOttawaRegion.com - OC Transpo backtracks on bus GPS release - by Laura Mueller (@LauraEMueller)

It's important to understand the OC Transpo is... and isn't part of the city (that's part of what this battle is about). The city itself has made great strides with open data, the short URL for the initiative is

ottawa.ca/opendata

and there is a dedicated open data lead on staff, Rob Giggey (@rob_giggey).

The council also has two strong defenders of the city's open data policy in Councillors Tim Tierney (@TimTierney) and Marianne Wilkinson (@Marianne4Kanata). They really understand that open data brings new ways of working and new opportunities.

Ottawa's local open data advocacy group Open Data Ottawa (@opendataottawa & on Facebook at fb.com/opendataottawa ) has also been pushing hard on the realtime transit open data front.

If you're someone who is interested in this data (as a citizen and/or a developer) you can help by letting Councillors Tierney and Wilkinson know of your support (as well as telling Mayor Jim Watson @JimWatsonOttawa and your local councillor) and by letting Open Data Ottawa know how you would like to use the data and what we could do to help. For what it's worth, you could also tell OC Transpo (@OC_Transpo) itself. Good hashtags to use are #octranspo and #opendata

Although I've listed lots of Twitter contact IDs, you can of course use all the regular postal mail, email, telephone, and Facebook channels to let the city and OC Transpo know what you think.

Previously:
January 18, 2012 OC Transpo would rather have ads than open data

OC Transpo would rather have ads than open data

2012-01-18T12:01:15-05:00

Ottawa Transit Commission just had its January 18, 2012 meeting and the OC Transpo representatives, including General Manager of Transit Services, Alain Mercier got a lot of questions when they came out with the assertion that Commission had to choose between completely in-house ad-supported applications from OC Transpo, and open data.

This is an absolutely classic bureaucratic organisation power play. It's about control, not technology. OC Transpo went as far as to assert that only they could "understand" the complexities of transit enough to produce "reliable" apps. In other words, "this is a hard problem, so no one outside our organisation should bother us with trying to solve it". This not only goes against the worldwide trend of opening up information and development in the understanding that "many eyes" are better, as well as the already demonstrated success of open data approaches in much larger jurisdictions, notably New York, Chicago and Boston.

OC Transpo is apparently saying "sure giant cities with millions of daily travelers on multiple modes of transit can trust developers with their open data, but our little bus-based system is way more difficult than that".

They are also making this strange argument that they "support" open data (as they have already publicly stated) but they don't "support" it so much that they actually want to do it, they'd rather have an exclusive ad contract. A situation which, I might ad, puts the entire burden of internal IT, maintenance, and keeping up with ever-changing web and mobile trends on OC Transpo. Do we really think being a software developer should be a core competency of our transit agency?

I've tried as best I could to capture and sort the discussion on Twitter. Ottawa's media are skilled users of Twitter, I was fortunate to have so much to work with... but there was so much from so many fronts that I'm sure it is both confusing and missing tweets.

Thanks to

@davidreevely
and his livetweeting on @reevelylive
@lauraemueller
@jchianello
@JonathanWilling

and thanks also to Councillors Wilkinson (@marianne4katana) & Tierney (@TimTierney) for defending Ottawa's open data policy and putting hard questions to OC Transpo.

View the story "OC Transpo and Open Data - Transit Commission - January 18, 2012" on Storify

Chicago has a Snow Portal - should Ottawa?

2012-01-13T14:55:41-05:00

With a nice snowstorm underway in Ottawa on this Friday the 13th, it seems timely to have a look at the state of the art in online snow information.

Chicago got a pre-launch writeup of its "snow portal" in the Economist - Winter strikes Chicago: Shovel ready. UPDATE 2012-01-14: And a launch writeup in the New York Times: Snow Site Lets Chicago See if Plows Are Really in a Rut. ENDUPDATE

The site has now launched, with the simple URL http://chicagoshovels.org/

It includes realtime GPS positions for snowplows on a map, as well as the ability to "adopt" a sidewalk for shoveling (sharing your adoption over social media) and to volunteer to shovel snow.

I was unable, however, to find any plow-specific datasets in the Chicago Data Portal (there are datasets about snow route & winter parking restrictions, as well as snow alerts).

Ottawa is a pretty snowy city too, although so far we're not close to our near-record 432 cm of snow received in 2008. (Yes, 4.32 metres of snow.)

Ottawa also has GPS-equipped plows. What would you like to see in an Ottawa "snow portal"? I'm not sure live positions of snowplows on a map is the most useful, although it's great as a demo.

Some ideas:

Snow & accident & quality based directions. "I want to get from X to Y, what routes are available for walking / driving / cycling that are cleared and safe, how recently were they cleared and when will they next be cleared? What do conditions look like? How busy / slow are they?"
This could use e.g. data and images from Ottawa's existing sensors, traffic cameras & incidents reports, and crowdsourced condition reports from ottawabikingproblems.ca and ottawawalkingproblems.ca
Since the snow & ice are not just problems, they're also recreational opportunities, you could expand this to include e.g. sledding hills, canal & outdoor rinks (including the Rink of Dreams) skating conditions, cross-country trails, ski hill conditions etc.

A few resources that are already available:

NCC - Rideau Canal skating conditions
Ottawa Open Data Portal - Cycling network
Ottawa Open Data Portal - Outdoor rinks (2009)
Ottawa Open Data Portal - Sledding hills (2010)

I'd like to hear your ideas, or if you prefer Facebook, Open Data Ottawa has also asked this question.

Since snow is common across Canada and the northern US (as well as in northern Europe), is this something that the Civic Commons or the Canadian G4 group of cities could work on?

I also wonder about where we could get more data. Now that we have "smart" parking meters with wireless payment capabilities, could every parking meter also be a local realtime weather sensor?

Twitter:

Hashtag for Chicago snow portal is #chicagoshovels
Chicago CTO: @ChicagoCTO
Chicago Chief Data Officer (CDO): @ChicagoCDO
Ottawa Open Data lead (city): @rob_giggey
Ottawa Open Data (citizen advocacy): @opendataottawa
I don't know if there is an equivalent Ottawa hashtag. #ottsnow ?

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

2012-01-06T14:47:20-05:00

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

2011-12-19T14:32:45-05:00

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

2011-12-18T16:59:55-05:00

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

2011-12-18T16:23:59-05:00

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

2011-12-15T21:26:14-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

learning about open data from our peers

2011-12-14T16:56:04-05:00

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

Amazing things have happened.

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

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

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

His list is

Leadership
Policy & Legal Framework
Technology & Apps
Capacity Building
Citizen Engagement
Innovation & Financing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many World Bank Links

Two things launched today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-12-10T08:26:12-05:00

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

2011-12-06T14:05:09-05:00

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:

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

short update on Ontario Open Data Portal

2011-11-23T14:28:57-05:00

Short as in one tweet long. Still in early stages, says @OntInnovation.

@OntInnovation OntarioInnovation

@citizensuite @scilib @marsdd Still in early stages. But here's shining eg. of great work we're seeing ontario.ca/zej5 @MNRcentral

22 Nov via web

Here's a Storify of the thread:

Previously:

June 14, 2011 open data project manager sought for Ontario
June 6, 2011 open data for the Province of Ontario

Treasury Board President Clement speaks about open government, social media

2011-11-23T07:04:48-05:00

President of the Treasury Board Tony Clement spoke at PS Engage 2011, introducing new guidelines on social media and reiterating his enthusiasm for an innovative public service as part of an open government.

Collaboration

What does collaboration mean in the context of your work?

You can look at it any number of ways. But in order to have the greatest impact on an open and modern Public Service, collaboration must be about knowledge-sharing.

This means exchanging information, engaging in dialogue and working together. This is about enhancing our productivity which, in turn, makes Canada more competitive in the global economy.

Technology

Internet-based tools are allowing public servants to be more productive than ever, by sharing information and communicating with Canadians more effectively and efficiently than even a few years ago.

The potential for greater knowledge-sharing is there.

...

There is a tremendous opportunity now to take the tools of information technology and make government faster, more effective and more efficient. I believe the Public Service can enhance core government business such as program and service delivery, and even policy-making, with the right technology tools.

...

Let’s not underestimate technology’s profound effect on the workplace – in government and beyond.

Faster technology, a more connected world, wider networks and complex problems will make teamwork and collaboration required skills.

Public servants will have to be savvy in their efforts to modernize their workplace. A modern workplace can have a tremendous positive impact on the overall performance of the Public Service and on a renewed organizational culture.

Innovation

As President of the Treasury Board, I consider myself the minister responsible for championing innovation within government. I want you to help me achieve the goal of a Public Service of the future.

Open Government and Open Data

In Canada, Open Government is being pursued through three main streams:

Open Data, which is about offering government data in more useful and machine readable formats;

Open Information, which is about proactively releasing information to Canadians on an ongoing basis; and

Open Dialogue, which gives Canadians a greater chance to input into the work of government

As part of our leadership role in increasing transparency and accountability, Canada has signalled its intent to join the international Open Government Partnership. This important initiative was launched by the United States and Brazil and aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.

Social Media

The Government encourages the use of new Web 2.0 tools and technologies such as blogs, wikis, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These tools help create a more modern, open and collaborative workplace and lead to more "just-in-time" communications with the public.

The [newly released] social media guidelines and policies will lead to improved interaction between Canadians and their government.

Web 2.0 tools and services provide additional means of interactive communications. They are the modern-day equivalents of "town halls" and are being used for various purposes including recruitment, emergency communications, service delivery, stakeholder outreach and as tools for collaboration and consultation.

Access to technology and the Internet

Clement also said, although it is not reflected in the online notes, that it makes no sense for employees to have more access to technology and the web at the coffeeshop than at work. (My paraphrase was "makes no sense for employees to have more access to tech in the coffeshop than at work", @PSEngage paraphrased as "PS should not have better connectivity on their way to work than at the office".)

References & Further Info

Tony Clement tweets @TonyClementCPC

PR for his announcement: Minister Clement highlights Open Government and new technology at PSEngage
full text of his speech
Guideline for External Use of Web 2.0
Canada's open government site: http://open.gc.ca/
Canada's commitment to the Open Government Partnership: http://www.opengovpartnership.org/countries/canada

Thanks to @stourang for quickly tweeting links to newly-posted TBS pages.

The Minister was speaking at the Public Sector Engage (PS Engage) conference, hashtag #PSE2011.

UPDATE 2011-12-18: Video of the Minister speaking is now available.

Previously:

October 19, 2011 Treasury Board President Clement speaks about open government at GTEC

international open data hack days

2011-11-17T13:11:02-05:00

Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) will be December 3 & 4, 2011.

It's a global collaboration with the possibility of local events.

It happens that International Open Data Hackathon also falls on December 3, 2011. It is focused on getting cities to host hackathon events.

Ottawa is hosting one at City Hall, you can register for free

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2488780008/

It's not just a technical event, it's about bringing everyone with an interest in open data, open government, and citizen engagement together so we can exchange ideas and make stuff.

The hashtags are #rhok and #odhd

Twitter retweets - how to drink less from the firehose

2011-10-31T15:54:03-04:00

Twitter has a rather well-buried feature that lets you control the retweets that you see in your twitterstream.

As far as I know this can only be done through the GUI, I don't see it listed as a Twitter command.

You can disable retweets per-user, that is, if you want to see text directly entered by someone, but not anything they just retweet, you can block seeing their retweets.

Find the small circle with "retweet cycle" arrows and click it (indicated with red arrow in image below). Retweets done by this user will no longer show up in your timeline. In the example below, if you clicked the circle, anything retweeted BY @scilib (me) wouldn't show up in your timeline any more.

There are also some search commands you can use with retweets. Unfortunately there is almost no documentation. Some appear to apply only to RT style retweets, some to both Twitter retweets and RTs.

You can try these parameters in a twitter search:

filter:retweets (show ONLY retweets)

-filter:retweets (everything EXCEPT retweets)

exclude:retweets (everything EXCEPT retweets)

include:retweets (include retweets)

Internet & social media - Official Languages examination - Senate Committee videos

2011-10-29T17:27:23-04:00

The Senate Official Languages Committee is conducting an "Examination on the use of the Internet, new media and social media and the respect for Canadians’ language rights".

There have been two meetings so far and the next is scheduled for October 31, 2011.

The first meeting was on October 24, 2011. Video and audio are available from ParlVU. This meeting was with the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages.

Video format is Window Media Video (WMV). In order to view this video on a Mac you will need to install Flip4Mac WMV (free).

Transcripts have not been posted yet.

The second meeting was on October 27, 2011. Video and audio are available from ParlVU. This meeting was with Treasury Board Secretariat. Notably, President of the Treasury Board Tony Clement.

The discussions included social media, the Digital Economy Strategy, and open data.

iPolitics.ca did an article based on the meeting and post-meeting interviews: Twitter, Facebook and social media ‘critical’ to government, Clement says. Some quotes from the article:

"It would be quite bizarre if we’re trying to hire the best and the brightest young people with great vitality coming into the public service and they’re used to having tethered tablets and instant social media feedback and they can do half of their work at the coffee shop without any difficulty and then suddenly they are transformed into a public servant and none of that is available. That would be a bizarre situation." - Tony Clement

...

Corinne Charette, the government’s chief information officer, said 66 federal government institutions now have bilingual twitter accounts and official government communications are presented in both official languages.

It’s also popular with government employees, she said.

“Social media is an exciting development. It is widely requested by public servants..."

...

Clement told senators he is also pushing ahead with his open data initiative, to get more raw data out of institutions like Statistics Canada and make it public.
“The more data we can get out there, the more applications can be thought of by brilliant people, entrepreneurs.”

The next meeting will be on October 31, 2011. Live video and audio will be available from ParlVU. The meeting will again be with Treasury Board Secretariat.

Witnesses

Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat

- Corinne Charette, Chief Information Officer of the Government of Canada

- Sue Lajoie, Senior Director, Community and Collaboration

- Ryan Androsoff, Senior Policy Advisor, Web 2.0, Community and Collaboration

- Marc Tremblay, Executive Director, Official Languages Centre of Excellence, Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer

The Senate tweets at @SenateCA / @senatCA

Hashtags (as declared in the Senate video stream) are #senCA and #OLLO

Twitter accounts:

Tony Clement @TonyClementCPC
Ryan Androsoff @RyanAndrosoff
iPolitics.ca @iPoliticsca
Elizabeth Thompson @LizT1

Previously:
October 19, 2011 Treasury Board President Clement speaks about open government at GTEC
January 28, 2011 open government in Canada [ETHI committee]

Here's a Storify of some of the Twitter traffic from October 27, 2011

View the story "Treasury Board President Clement - social media and open data" on Storify

Google data visualisation contest for French 2012 election

2011-10-24T10:57:49-04:00

Concours Google de Dataviz

Tous les jours, un milliard de recherches sont effectuées sur Google, 140 millions de messages sont envoyés sur Twitter et 70 000 heures de vidéo sont mises en ligne sur YouTube. Vous croyez encore que les médias traditionnels suffiront pour vivre l'élection présidentielle ?

Libérez la puissance des données de Google et Twitter en développant une application web innovante pour suivre l'élection présidentielle française. Proposez un nouveau regard sur la campagne en réalisant une interface intelligente de visualisation de données.

La meilleure application sera intégrée à la chaîne YouTube dédiée à la campagne présidentielle.

https://sites.google.com/site/concoursdataviz2012/ - short URL goo.gl/N2i2E - hashtag #googleviz

Date limite: 07 décembre 2011

8. Critères d’admissibilité/éligibilité
Les critères d’admissibilité d’une Application sont définis comme suit. L’Application doit

Être une application interactive

Utiliser a minima un jeu de données provenant de Google ou de Twitter.

Éclairer de façon perspicace et originale la campagne présidentielle 2012

Rester en ligne et pertinente jusqu’à la fin de l’élection présidentielle 2012

Être au format 960 x 785 pixels maximum

Être en langue française

Etre portée par une équipe comportant entre 1 et 4 personnes

from Le règlement

Contest is open worldwide but submissions must be in French for a French public.

@dataveyes is organising the contest.

Here's a Storify of a few related tweets:

CISTI / DataCite Canada - presentations for Open Access Week 2011

2011-10-21T12:32:51-04:00

Two presentations for Open Access Week 2011:

Introduction to DataCite Canada

Karen Morgenroth (CISTI) & Wendy Watkins (Data Centre- Library); Monday, October 24, 2011; 2:00-3:00pm; Room 235 Library [Carleton U, Ottawa]

...
Karen Morgenroth will discuss DataCite Canada's technical solutions for registration. It will also look at DataCite Canada's beta project with several Canadian data centres, including Carleton University.
Carleton's pilot involves the Millennium Scholarship Foundation Research Data holdings, a unique and valuable collection rescued by the Data Centre. Wendy Watkins will provide an overview of the resource, its importance to scholarlship and the progress of the project to date. Assigning persistent identifiiers to this collection will mean that scholars and students will be able to find and use the resource in the future.

from Carleton Library - Scholarly Communications: OA Events

Also see this document (PDF) from CARL with information about registering for in-person or webcast.

Open Access to Data: New Initiatives and the Challenges of Data Management

Date: Thursday, October 27. Time: 1:00-3:00

Location: Ante Chamber 3129DV, U of T Mississauga.

Join us for a panel presentation and discussion of new initiatives and challenges associated with opening access to national, regional, municipal and research data.

...

Panel members:

Steve Czajka, OLS, OLIP, Supervisor, Information Planning, City of Mississauga Planning and Building Department, Policy Planning Division

Ron Jaros MES, MCIP, RPP, OLS, OLIP, Planning Manager, Information and Intelligence Team, Region of Peel

Diane Carley, Digital Initiatives Analyst, Project Manager - DataCite Canada, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information

Andrew Nicholson, GIS and Data Librarian U of T Mississauga Library

Berenica Vejvoda, Data Librarian, Data Liberation Initiative Representative, Map & Data Library University of Toronto Libraries.

from University of Toronto (Mississauga) - Join Us for 2011 Events

For other events from Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) members, see 2011 Events @ CARL Libraries.

Twitter:

Karen Morgenroth @kmorgenroth
Diane Carley @dianecarley
DataCite Canada @datacitecanada
DataCite @datacite