Informal Government of Canada Open Data Strategy Jam

Posted by Jennifer Bell on 2010-03-17 17:48:26

An update to yesterday's post on Canadian Open Data events: An informal meet-up of Government of Canada employees for drafting Canada's Open Data Strategy was announced yesterday on twitter. The group will be meeting Friday at Darcy McGee's, not far from Parliament Hill. The announcement, which warms my heart, reads:

Informal group getting together to build a draft strategy in an insanely short period of time, off the corner of our desks because we believe in it.

The meet-up is a first response to Chuck Shawcross, CIO of Environment Canada, who challenged GoC employees at a recent conference to write an open data strategy on GCPEDIA, the federal government's internal wiki. I see that a number of heroes within GoC on this topic (as well as senior staff) have already signed on for the meet-up.

Not that this group needs recommendations, but some good starting points would be:

• International Precedents: See similar strategies from the US, UK, and Australia.
• Making it Actually Work: See the recommendations from 'Towards a 21st Century Right to Know Agenda', the non-profit research report that president Obama's team took cues from when planning the US's Open Government Initiative. In the past, we've singled out 8 of the most pertinent recommendations for Canada.
• Prioritizing What to Release: An important but as-yet unimplemented part of the US's Open Government Directive is prioritizing what data sets to release (see section 1.f.ii), to make the best match between public benefit and limited government resources. Some ideas for how this could work in Canada, using data from infosource.gc.ca, the Information Commissioner's list of all GoC information not protected by privacy laws, are here and here.
• Licensing: We've collected links to a number of references on public sector information licensing practices on opendatalinks.ca (see this great post by David Eaves on why licensing is important). The easiest thing to do, however, may be to follow the example of Australia and New Zealand, who have proposed adopting CC-BY as the default for all public sector information.
• Other References:A growing (but by no means an exhaustive) list of references on open data is available on the website opendatalinks.ca, a VisibleGovernment project.

Good luck, you guys.