Canada’s Information Commissioners have adopted a resolution toward Open Government and part of the open government process is open access to public administrative, census, map and research data. A number of Canadian Cities, innovative government programs such as GeoConnections, forward thinking research funding such as International Polar Year have become OpenData cities, implemented data sharing infrastructures and fund data sharing science. Access to data are one part of the open government conversation, and it is argued that opendata bring us closer to more informed democratic deliberations on public policy.
Human-AI Co-Creation of Worked Examples for Programming Classes
Open Data Initiatives in Canada: One part of the Open Government Conversation
1. Open Data Initiatives in Canada:
Part of the OpenGov Conversation
Tracey P. Lauriault
Open Access Week: Carleton University
Carleton MacOdrum Library - Room 102
Thursday, October 21st, 12:00-1:00pm
Ottawa
3. Open Government
Cultural change in government
Access mechanisms built in to new
programs and services
Broad public consultation
Identify what the public needs to
keep government accountable – build
trust
Open Accessible Reusable
Free or low cost, w/data stuctures
to discover, understand, interpret
and develop technology to use +
citizen participation
4. Open Government Data Principles
http://resource.org/8_principles.html
1.Complete: All public data are made available. Public data are data that
is not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege limitations.
2. Primary: Data are as collected at the source, with the highest possible
level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified forms.
3. Timely: Data are made available as quickly as necessary to preserve the
value of the data.
4. Accessible: Data are available to the widest range of users for the
widest range of purposes.
5. Machine processable: Data are reasonably structured to allow automated
processing.
6. Non-discriminatory: Data are available to anyone, with no requirement
of registration.
7. Non-proprietary: Data are available in a format over which no entity
has exclusive control.
8. License-free: Data are not subject to any copyright, patent, trademark
or trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and privilege
restrictions may be allowed.
6. Gov. Consultations - Old School
http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/
2011/consultation/ContentReport-RapportContenu/index-eng.cfm
Trusted,
expensive,
broad,
tradional,
& in this
case
overruled.
7. Cit. & Gov. Consultations - New School
http://transitcamp.wik.
s/2007_Transit_Camp
http://changecamp.ca/ http://opengovwest.org
Citizen led, engaged, innovative, risk taking, creative
change is expected. Needs to be more sustainable.
8. Gov. Consultation - Wrong School
http://datalibre.ca/2010/07/14/
consultation-real-results/
15. Page Scraping
http://www2.parl.gc.ca/housechamberbusiness/ChamberSittings.aspx
Screen / page scraping: “is
a technique in which a
computer program extracts
data from the display output
of another program. The
program doing the scraping
is called a screen scraper.
The key element that
distinguishes screen
scraping from regular
parsing is that the output
being scraped was intended
for final display to a human
user, rather than as input
to another program, and is
therefore usually neither
documented nor structured
for convenient parsing”.
http://www.cramster.com/refe
rence/wiki.aspx?
wiki_name=Screen_scraping
44. The conversation has just started,
and I hope we can mobilize our
national knowledge resources at all
scales to collectively work on
resolving some of our toughest issues
and to create a more open, inclusive
& collaborative culture.
Notes de l'éditeur
Disclosed.ca collects contract disclosure information from over a hundred different federal government websites, and makes them easily searchable.
"How'd They Vote?" aims to be a non-partisan website which provides a variety of in-depth information on the operations of the Canadian Parliament, specifically, how our politicians vote and what they've said. We take Hansard and extract information on bills, members of parliament, votes, and speeches. Hansard is an excellent resource, but it is not the mandate of the parliament website to fully index and extract every nugget of interesting information from it.
howdtheyvote.ca was launched in May 2005 by Cory Horner.
In the interest of remaining non-partisan, we will keep this site advertising-free by accepting donations to help offset our hosting costs, maintain the site, and add new features. Donations can be made by PayPal, using the link below. For larger recurring donations, please consider becoming a sponsor. For our current financial status, see our open budget.
Citizen Factory is here - it's an online resource for Canadian youth created by Apathy is Boring. Our goal is to help you make sense of Parliament. It's a two-step process: first Citizen Factory aggregates all the Parliamentary information that we can find. Next, we distill that information, so that it's easier to understand how your government works.
Government of Canada logo
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage. The opinions expressed in this website do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Canadian Heritage.
How does it work?
The information in Citizen Factory is compiled from a number of different sources, ranging from the Library of Parliament to Twitter.
The magic behind Citizen Factory was provided by an Ottawan and three Montrealers: Shawn Simister, Daniel Haran, Francis Wu, and Michael Lenczner. The source code is freely available.
Parliament remains a crucial engine of our democracy. And it all happens in the open. But, too often, information that's technically available is difficult to find and use. This site aims to make some of that information more easily accessible, and to encourage transparency in government.
Behind the curtain
Hi. I'm Michael. (You can reach me via e-mail.) This site is a volunteer, spare-time effort of mine. I built it because I think Parliament's goings-on are important—alternately fascinating, boring, and depressing, but important—and because I believe that public information should be meaningfully public, which today means shareable and computer-readable.
In building the site, I had no shortage of inspirations. In particular, TheyWorkForYou.com does wonderful things in the UK. Thanks also to How'd They Vote, Canada's OG Hansard scraper, whose API I'm gratefully using to match postal codes with MPs. And thanks to whoever in Parliamentary IT made vote information available in XML; you saved me much time and hair.
Pitch in
Here's how you can help.
Programmers
This site is free software. We run on Python and Django. If you notice a bug or want to add functionality, patches are wonderful things. Reports and suggestions should go to our issue tracker, or e-mail. I've listed some ideas for projects. You're also very much encouraged to build your own projects on top of our code and data. We have a bare-bones API for Hansard transcripts, and I'm happy to add requested API functionality.
Graphic/Interface Designers
Design is crucial to making information accessible. This site is my amateur effort; suggestions and contributions are deeply welcome.
RepresentMe
Inspiration Represent - The New York Times.
Open Data Ottawa - Gave developers like me a platform to show our work.
News All the news for RepresentMe comes from a small collection of RSS feeds.
You can download the complete list in XBEL format here.
Data
* How'd They Vote - MP voting records and bill descriptions.
* Freebase - Topic details for representatives and regions.
* Statistics Canada - Electoral district profiles.
Code
* JQuery - Javascript plugin framework.
* Bundle-Fu - Resource bundling plugin.
* YM4R - Google Maps integration.
Graphics
* Silk Icons - Icons used throughout the site.
* Sketch Rothwell - Font used for title.
FixMyStreet Canada is maintained by the non-profit VisibleGovernment.ca.
The site was inspired by MySociety's (http://www.mysociety.org/), which was adapted for Canada by Chris Taggart of OpenOttawa (http://www.openottawa.org/).