Responses – Canadian Digital Information Strategy

April 9, 2008 in Uncategorized by Tracey | 1 comment

Responses to October 2007 Draft Strategy

Arising from the 2006 National Summit, the Draft Canadian Digital Information Strategy (CDIS) was issued for review in 2007 from any interested person or organization. The review period is closed; however, the Draft Strategy remains available. All responses to the 2007 Draft Strategy are posted online.

Submissions received, including the name of the person or organization making the submission, have been posted in the official language in which they were submitted. Content of the submissions has been posted as received; however, minor reformatting may have occurred during HTML conversion. Personal address information has been removed.

Unfortunately, there were no folks from the free and open access movement (Except for Russel), there were no new media artists, there were no open source organizations, no media activists, there were no free data advocates, no podcasters, no organizations doing interesting work with media, no geomatics groups, no businesses, no volunteer organizations or civil sector organizations that submitted comments and feedback.

This lack of presensence is perhaps attributed to: short time to respond, exposure, who got sent the notice, the government speak of the document, the belief that it will not make a difference, cultural disconnect with the process and so on.

Too bad though!  As this document could have been greatly improved with inputs from those groups.  The consultation process was boring and lacked interactivity and so on, but alas it remains a consultation on an issue that may affect your/our works access into the future and your/our access to other works.

If someone has ideas on how to make participatory democracy sexier than this process then put it forward, otherwise this is what we wind up living with.

1 comment

  1. Heather Morrison’s avatar

    Heather Morrison on April 9, 2008 at 4:41 pm

    hi Tracey – thank you for posting the link to the responses. While it would have been great to have seen even more pro-OA and pro-open-data responses, and, as you point out, this may have happened given more time, there were some responses that are very much pro-OA pro-open data.

    For example, the Canadian Library Association response says, in response to whether to support the strategies:
    Yes. In particular, we would like to applaud and support:

    “3.3 Provide timely and open online access to Canada’s public information and publicly funded research information and data.” CLA and its members strongly support open access where appropriate, and CLA itself has a broad open access policy.

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