The New York Times online has 3 articles about their 2010 decennial census (1)(2)(3)(topic). India will be conducting its count +/- 1 000 000 000 people, and this year’s census includes biometrics. Every person of 15 + years will have their photo and a thumbprint taken. India will then be producing national ID cards. This is no small administrative undertaking as

some 2.5 million census officials will visit households in more than 7,000 towns and 600,000 villages

This count will, for the first time, also attempt to gather information on the use of the internet and the availability of drinking water and toilets in households.

The commentaries in the BBC article consider this a move into the modern age for India. It is ironic that the first country to implement the infrastructure of biometrics with that of census taking does not have universal education, let alone access to clean water & toilets for all, nor a telecom system that can deliver a landline within a year after it has been requested and incredible illiteracy. The comments in the article remain positive.

The Canadian census will be conducted in May 2011. This counting exercise is an incredibly powerful institution, it is one of the biggest administrative collective events the country undertakes, and approximately 80 pieces of legislation spin into action once the count is released. The census is also intricately tied to our representative electoral system, it is its raison d’être. Federal Electoral Boundaries change after the 01 decennial censuses and this has been so since the taking of the first confederation census of 1871.

According to the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act:

14. (1) On receipt by the Chief Electoral Officer from the Chief Statistician of the return referred to in section 13, the Chief Electoral Officer shall calculate the number of members of the House of Commons to be assigned to each of the provinces, subject and according to the provisions of section 51 of the Constitution Act, 1867 and the rules provided therein, and on the completion of that calculation shall cause a statement to be published in the Canada Gazette setting out the results thereof.

The exercise of mapping these new boundaries happens thereafter:

28. As soon as possible after the issue of the proclamation declaring the representation order to be in force, the Director General of the Surveys and Mapping Branch of the Department of Natural Resources shall, in accordance with the descriptions and definitions set out in the order, and with the cooperation of the Chief Electoral Officer, prepare and print

Counting matters, how we count matters even more, and the count shapes our form of administrative nationalism.

In the US the Census is a public record, in Canada it is sold back to us. According to the Statistics Act we are legally bound to fill out the census

(2) Subject to section 8, a person to whom a form is sent pursuant to subsection (1) shall answer the inquiries thereon and return the form and answers to Statistics Canada properly certified as accurate, not later than the time prescribed therefor by the Minister and indicated on the form or not later than such extended time as may be allowed in the discretion of the Minister. 1970-71-72, c. 15, s. 22; 1980-81-82-83, c. 47, s. 41.

The agency is however not bound to share these data at no cost with the citizens it counted, and when it does sell the data the use licenses are incredibly restrictive. Citizens who want Statistics Canada data have to purchase them while resellers make a profit by reselling them their own records. Making the Census a public record in the public domain and building an infrastructure to disseminate these data, would be a way to liberate our data. That would be part of open government strategies, it is what open data is about, and is also a way to encourage more informed deliberative democracy.

Now would be the time to push for more open access to our census data!

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities in its work on Quality of Life Reporting in Canada’s 24 big cities has just released its 6th thematic report:

Mending Canada´s Frayed Social Safety Net: The role of municipal governments

These reports are really loaded with Municipal, Provincial and Federal administrative data on a wide variety of topics.

Collecting data from cities is incredibly difficult, it gets worse at the provincial level, and improves somewhat at the Federal level with some departments being better than others.

I hope that Open Data movements and initiatives in Canada will inspire all of our public sectors. Our 3 at times 4 levels of government will hopefully begin to coordinate their information and data resources and make them more readily available to the public.

Canadian’s need more evidence based reporting than ever, to manage the smaller finacial morsels coming back to our cities, and it is reports like these that help us inform those decisions. Clearly, we have been missing some evidence!

Benedict Anderson’s wonderful book on nationalism Imagined Communities introduced the idea of simultaneity. Print media, back in the day, especially in vernacular languages (i.e. not latin) enabled the reading of the same ideas in different places at the same time (i.e. the morning paper) for the first time. This, he stated, created unity and a form of distributed collective identity, a disparate community bound by ideas, in some cases forming a nation.

Eduardo Galeano, in his book Soccer in Sun and Shadow did the same as Anderson, in his case it is not through print media but instead soccer that community, a shared identity and a nation are created:

“All Uruguayan babies are born crying, ‘goal’,” the Uruguayan writer and soccer aficionado Eduardo Galeano said over coffee recently. Perhaps, that’s how a country of three million or so could have won two World Cups and two Olympic gold medals. It also helps explain the country’s level of despair after Uruguay’s dramatic World Cup elimination at the feet of the Australian Socceroos last November in a penalty shootout.

(ref).

In Canada, some say it is Hockey. In my case, I would say, Olympic Hockey, as I do not pay attention to the sport at any other time, it is just not a part of my reality, it is not a marker of my identity. Yet, like millions of others, I demonstrated a sense of patriotism and participated in the national act of watching the Canada – US Gold Medal men’s Game.

And what does that have to do with data? Well, back to simultaneity – more so the measuring of it.

EPCOR, the water utility in Edmonton measured water consumption during the game, and as seen in the graph below.

Simultaneity

The EPCOR spokesman Tim le Riche, explains:

“The chart does tell us that Edmonton hockey fans are pretty dedicated,”

Water use plummeted below normal right at the 1:30 p.m. faceoff time.

Usage held around 370 megalitres (ML) until the first intermission, when use skyrocketed to 450 ML within minutes.

There was less water used during the second period and even less in the third.

Use dropped to 320 ML near the end of the game, when the U.S. scored a tying goal at about 3:30 p.m., and again when Sidney Crosby scored the winning goal in overtime.

Usage skyrocketed to 460 ML immediately after the medal ceremony.

It’s assumed most of the spike is due to bathroom use, said le Riche, though it would also include water used in the kitchen and in bars.

Data analysis at its best!

Via:
Flowing Data: Canada: the country that pees together stays together
Pat’s Papers: What If Everybody in Canada Flushed At Once?
Edmonton Sun: EPCOR charts fan flushes
Smart Planet: Infographic: Water consumption in Edmonton, Canada during Olympic gold medal hockey game

This is a big week!

Friday, March 5 all day, there is a fantastic conference at Ottawa University for the inauguration of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society: Taking Stock of Tech: Reflections on Law, Technology and Society. The conference Program is fantastic and includes some of the world’s foremost authorities on things law, infrastructure, data, socio-tehnology…

Thursday, March 4, Cambridge Room of the Holiday Inn, 111 Cooper Street in downtown Ottawa at 5:00 p.m., Lecture: Zeroing In: Infrastructure Ruins and Datalands in Afghanistan and Iraq by Dr. Lisa Parks, chair of film and media studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB)

Parks will analyze satellite images of declassified pictures of bombed sites in Afghanistan and Iraq in the context of the American policy that limits access to satellite images due to U.S. national security interests, as well as discussing some of the controversy surrounding the use of Google Earth..

Today, March 1, The City of Ottawa IT-Sub Committee meeting discussed Open Data.
3 Constituents spoke: John Whelan from Open Street Map (OSM) Ottawa, Hacktivist Edward Ocampo-Gooding and Tracey P. Lauriault.
I characterize the sentiment as cautious optimism, with concerns regarding the private sector capitalizing on open data, cost recovery, and cost priorities of the city. The argument was made that business being innovative with data was good as they are our employers, our tax payers and our revenue generators.
There was great support from Councilor Legendre, Rideau-Rockliffe Ward, stating that the most dangerous argument being made was for ‘democracy’. He was also very surprised that the City did not already have such a an open data policy in place. The Chair of the Committee, Councillor Wilkinson Kanata Ward, was very interested in different applications, while Councillors Chiarelli, College ward and Desroches of Gloucester-South Nepean Ward, expressed concern for costs to implement and the loss of potential revenue generating activities. Bref – The ideas of open data, open access or open government were new to all the councillors and my take is much education is required to help our representatives understand the issues.
City Staff did a great job putting together a presentation showcasing other city initiatives, innovative applications, benefits to the city and the demand for this by citizens.

In several countries more official data are being issued in raw form so that anybody can use them. This forces bureaucrats and creative types to interact in new ways

Among America’s number-crunchers-in-chief, it is Mr Chopra whose office comes closest to the new culture of using data in a free, creative way. He thinks more government agencies should mimic the division of labour that now defines his own job at the top of the American administration: a CIO who guards stable information platforms and a CTO who cultivates data-handling talent in the open market.

Even the UK has come on board, recognizing that managing royalties and sales under the guise of cost recovery is more expensive than sharing the data.

Tom Steinberg, a British pioneer of data use, believes that what is valuable is what the market already pays for. He runs mySociety, a non-profit organisation founded in 2003 that builds simple web-based tools with self-descriptive names like “faxyourmp” and “fixmystreet”. Location is crucial to detecting patterns in public information; a map of crimes is more valuable than a list. Britain’s Ordnance Survey owns the country’s geographic data and, through an arrangement known as a “trading fund” sells them to, among others, mySociety. In 2008 economic analysis commissioned by Britain’s Treasury argued that the public value of the trading-fund information was greater than its revenue value to the crown; mapping data will be released free of charge from April.

The Economist: Of governments and geeks