The Canadian Council on Social Development (CCSD) and its Community Data Program is taking a leadership role in open data and open government and will be representing Canadian Civil Society at the Open Government Partnership meetings in Brazil.  Harvey Low will be attending, and here is the letter of submission that introduces Harvey and CCSD ideas which led to the award a seat at the table and full funding to attend.

This Open Government Partnership meeting, the current Federal Government Open Data Initiative, the latest consultations, the new Open Government Panel launched 2 days ago, will affect and may redirect some of the work you have been doing as researchers, open data advocates, scientists, geomaticians, data and map librarians and any others involved in evidence based decision making.

The open data and open government work is exciting indeed, but it may not be well grounded in well established practices in interoperability, portals, metadata standards and federated catalogs and the mechanism currently being implemented might become the norm.  Also, these are policy formulation days and your input is critical at this time, especially if  you want policy directions to reflect your endeavours.

The CCSD would like to solicit your ideas and opinions in preparation for the meetings in Brazil.  For instance if you had an opportunity to attend what would you want the Government of Canada to do on this file? What would benefit your communities of practice? What kind of funding are required to build TDRs, understand data access and open government? and What would you want international delegates to know about your work ? What kind of WGs should be created to advise the panel (data, portal, law, archiving, funding)?

Harvey will be holding an open conference call next week Wed March 7 at 11am EST, and Thur March 8 at 11am EST, you can join on one or the other calls, and we also welcome you input by email, in the comments, you can join the civicaccess.ca list and participate in the conversation there, or you may also want to write a letter or a position statement and Harvey will gladly point to it from here and bring it to Brazil.  The CCSD will also follow-up with you after the meetings to report results and discuss next steps.

Please respond to this tlauriau@gmail.com if you would like to participate in the call.

Your input is important and we hope to hear from you & please watch these initiatives.