I never thought I would witness in my lifetime Canada doing something like this. On the one side the government is pretending to 'open government' and promoting 'digital literacy' and 'open data' and on the it is dismantling the institutions that produce and disseminate that scientific knowledge!
When I tell people this story in Ireland, they are totally dismayed, as Canada is painted as the 'good one', the 'one to follow'. So embarrassing that this is happening, but more importantly, it is the loss of the 'evidence' part of the evidence informed policy and the evidence informed part of democratic deliberation, and the thwarting of smart planning.
Scholars, officials, professionals, companies and open data enthusiasts in this space, this is our issue, and we have done a poor job at it.
I am very saddened to see that we (myself and those involved) in open data did not create campaigns and take this on. It was mentioned in the OGP independent report, but that is as far as it went on the open data side, except of course the work I did on Datalibre.ca and some work David Eaves posted on his blog. Some social policy think tanks, the most cash strapped organizations on the civil society side, did take it on. But that was then, and this is now. Open data is useless without data at the end of the day is it not? We advocate for open data for 'innovative' purposes and for economic return, for 'app development' and we advocate for open formats, and bulk downloads, and licences, but we forgot to advocate for actual data and knowledge producing institutions! In fact our definitions for open is based on the qualities of the form of the data and how they are accessed, which makes sense on a commercialization side, but we do not focus on data quality nor good metadata let alone for data producing institutions.
I am sorry indeed!
Tracey
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