urging governments to make data about canada and canadians free and accessible to citizens
I am a web-guy, writer, and participant in the open movement. I started LibriVox.org, and have a little software development company.
You can find me at http://hugmcguire.net.
Open Access: the New World of Research Communication
The University of Ottawa Library, in association with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), hosted a public seminar entitled Open Access: the New World of Research Communication on Wednesday October 10, 2007
See here for vid.
Yes, we map all 4,294,967,296 IP addresses onto a huge image and let you zoom into it and pan around. Just like google maps, but more internetty.
Zipskinny.com … enter a (US) zip code, get census data, and other goodies. Very nice. Does anyone know how much would it cost to pay statscanada for a license to do something similar in Canada?
From ie.blognation.com:
In a recent competition for the best idea for a webapp with an Irish focus, I was surprised to find several submissions were about citizen interaction with the public service and the Government. This set me thinking that we should not encourage the public service to build applications and sites but to build APIs for our data.
The key word is “ourâ€. There is still a strong belief in the public service that somehow they own our data whether that is a hospital telling me I can only get my son’s x-rays through the Freedom of Information act, the Ordnance Survey keeping an iron-grip on GIS data or local government publishing data in proprietary Word docs and PDFs….
[thanks for the pointer, mat]
The Green Party, reports Michael Geist, put out it’s policy document.
Have not looked thru it yet, but there’s support for network neutrality:
Supporting the free flow of information
The Internet has become an essential tool in knowledge storage and the free flow of information between citizens. It is playing a critical role in democratizing communications and society as a whole. There are corporations that want to control the content of information on the internet and alter the free flow of information by giving preferential treatment to those who pay extra for faster service.
Our Vision
The Green Party of Canada is committed to the original design principle of the internet – network neutrality: the idea that a maximally useful public information network treats all content, sites, and platforms equally, thus allowing the network to carry every form of information and support every kind of application.
Green Solutions
Green Party MPs will:
* Pass legislation granting the Internet in Canada the status of Common Carrier – prohibiting Internet Service Providers from discriminating due to content while freeing them from liability for content transmitted through their systems.
and free/open source software:
Open source computer software
As computer hardware improves, it is important that software programs are readily modifiable by the people who buy and use them. Developing alongside the proprietary software sector is Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). This software is generally available at little or no cost, making it very popular in the developing world. It can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed with little or no restriction. Businesses can adapt the software to their specific needs.
Under the free software business model, vendors may charge a fee for distribution and offer paid support and customization services. Free software gives users the ability to work together enhancing and refining the programs they use. It is a pure public good rather than a private good.
Our Vision
The Green Party supports the goals and ideals of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and believes that Canada’s competitiveness in global information technology (IT) will be greatly enhanced by strongly supporting FLOSS.
Green Solutions
Green Party MPs will:
* Ensure that all new software developed for or by government is based on open standards and encourage and support a nationwide transition to FLOSS in all critical government IT systems. This will make Canada’s IT infrastructure more secure and robust, lower administration and licensing costs and develop IT skills.
* Support the transition to FLOSS throughout the educational system
I’d say it would be worth asking them what they think of civic access to canadian government data.
The Guardian UK Tech Section has an ongoing campaign to free UK government data, with an associated blog: freeourdata.org.uk/blog.
Their campaign inspired a response from the Ordnance Survey titled:
These maps cost us £110m. We can’t give them away for free. The response argues that the maps cost money, that the OS needs money to operate, and that by charging for the maps they can continue to provide a valuable service. Among other things:
It cost Ordnance Survey £110m to collect, maintain and supply our data last year, but we are not “paid for by taxes”, as the campaign often claims. Instead, we depend entirely on receipts from licensing and direct sales to customers for our income – we receive no tax funding at all.
If we are successful, we can cover our costs, encourage widespread licensing through partners, and stay focused on providing value for users. Under licence, there are many examples where our data is free at the point of use. This does not mean there is zero cost.
[Interesting to note that the OS’s clients, much like statscan clients, are “users,” not citizens].
The Free Our Data people responded to response in their blog, noting the key reason for their campaign:
We believe [making OS data and maps free] would set off an explosion in private-sector use of the data, and lead to more companies which would create more jobs and generate more taxes. That would offset any extra taxation required to fund OS. Making the data free would also get rid of onerous and inefficient licensing schemes that tangle up central and local government departments, which wonder if they can reuse something or even display it on the web. (Search this blog for NEPHO.)
And that was followed by further response from Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo, the authors of the Power of Information, who say:
The key issue about charging is whether the UK would benefit more in net terms from the more vibrant information market that more open information would bring than it would lose through having to find an additional £60m per year. This is a serious question that the Treasury is currently looking into, having accepted the recommendation in the independent review we co-authored for the government earlier this year.
Which garnered some further feedback from the Free Our Data.
And in the end this is a compelling case, perhaps the compelling case: a case that ought to convince you whatever your political leanings, right or left or circular. There are moral and social and philosophical reasons to support free government data. But the one that’s most likely to win converts is the case that free data makes for more innovation. The innovation can be commercial, social, socioeconomic – touching on health, environment, planning, equality etc, but also just good old-fashioned economic vitality.
But all of it, we’d argue, will “make Canada a better country” not just morally, but in our ability to solve important problems, and, yes, make some people more money in the mean time. Which means, in the end, more tax receipts, which means that it should offset any lost revenues Statscan and other Canadian agencies now receive for excluding all but big companies and institutions from their datasets.
The issue of public access to government data has a number of components: availability (is it available?), format (is it in a usable/open format?), cost (is it free?), and copyright (do I need permission to use it, may I do with it what I wish?).
The City of Toronto has recently launched a campaign to get more money for cities from the Federal government, asking for one cent from the GST. The campaign is called: onecentnow.ca, and uses the Canadian penny in ads and on their web site.
They’ve received a retroactive bill from the Royal Canadian Mint for $47,000+ for use of the image of the Canadian penny, and for use of the words “one cent” (!).
There are political/moral issues here about how government agencies use (or abuse) existing laws. Notably, the Royal Canadian Mint is a crown corporation that answers to the federal government, and the federal government is a target of the onecentnow.ca campaign, so this retroactive charge could be interpreted as politically motivated. Perhaps not.
And of course there are policy issues about how Crown Copyright ought to be used, or whether it should exist at all. In the USA, for instance, federal government documents, designs and publications are de facto in the public domain.
But other than these abstract concerns, there is a more crucial point: the Mint appears to be on the wrong side of the Canadian Copyright Act. As Howard Knopf points out in Excess Copyright, Canadian copyright law provides copyright protection until 50 years after the death of the creator. Crown Copyright extends 50 years after date of publication.
The Canadian penny was designed by G.E. Kruger Gray in 1937. He died in 1943, meaning that the design for the Canadian penny went into the public domain 50 years later, in 1993. Which means that no one, including the Royal Canadian Mint, can claim ownership of the image, much less charge for its use.
He notes further that it seems unlikely that any court would agree with the Mint that they own a copyright or trademark on the words “one cent.”
So it seems possible that the Royal Canadian Mint has developed an Intellectual Property policy that is claiming – and charging for – ownership where none exists.
The World Freedom Atlas is:
an online geo-visualization tool that shows a number of freedom indicators so to speak. For example, you can map by a number of indexes such as raw political rights score, civil liberties, political imprisonment, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or torture. If I’ve counted correctly the data comes from 42 datasets divided into three categories:
[from the wonderfully-named blog, flowingdata.com]
One of the big worries about access to government data are issues of privacy. Here’s a video of Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner, taking to engineers at Waterloo, about the importance of designing for privacy:
Globally, issues about information privacy in the marketplace have emerged in tandem with the dramatic and escalating increase in information stored in electronic formats. Data mining, for example, can be extremely valuable for businesses, but in the absence of adequate safeguards, it can jeopradize informational privacy. Dr. Ann Cavoukian talks about how to use technology to enhance privacy. Some of the technologies discussed included instant messaging, RFID tags and Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC). Then Dr. Cavoukian explained the “7 Privacy – Embedded Laws†followed by a discussion on a biometrics solution to encryption.
Spacingmontreal.ca and spacingtoronto.ca are:
your hub for daily dispatches from the streets of Toronto/Montreal to cities around the world, offering both analysis and a forum for discussion. Our contributors examine city hall, architecture, urban planning, public transit, transportation infrastructure and just about anything that involves the public realm of our cities.
Both blogs are published by spacing magazine.
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