---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: N. Bloch <
[hidden email]>
Date: Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 4:40 PM
Subject: Witness briefs now posted online as part of House of Commons standing committee activities
To: <
[hidden email]>
Hi everyone,
For those who haven't discovered them yet: a quietly introduced but
surprisingly 'radical' new feature this year on the
parl.gc.ca website
is the addition of witness briefs to standing committee activities (only
for session 42-1 thus far).
e.g.
http://www.parl.gc.ca/Committees/en/PDAM/StudyActivity?studyActivityId=8765254
Access to briefs that inform committee work is something I've been
advocating for years, so I'm pretty excited about this. (Of course,
stakeholder briefs are not technically government documents, but they
are important public documents nonetheless for a variety of reasons.)
I was wondering if any of you have been using this feature thus far, and
if so, if you would be willing to share with me the context off-list.
As well, I have now scraped committee pages to collect complete data on
which briefs have been posted.
The short story: in just this one session, over 700 briefs have been
posted. Based on a superficial analysis I've ascertained that not all
stakeholder briefs for 42-1 have been posted. I'm still working on the
details and also hope to be able to recover some of those documents.
Although this will be shared as a queryable database as soon as I have
the time, for now you can access the first-pass data at:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ANh0RcZ5EdwnAbukuV9MnJRY51e-dcV6LRAD-Jq7rco/edit?usp=sharing
Feel free to use this to support patrons who may be trying to track down
committee briefs, or however it may be of service. If you have requests
for how I should be expanding the data or if you'd like to collaborate,
I'd be happy to hear from you.
Accessibility of stakeholder briefs, specifically, are complicated by
some copyright issues. However stated government policy since about 2013
has been that stakeholders should expect their briefs to become "public
documents" that may be posted on committee pages.
Unfortunately, this new practice does not address the longstanding
problem of the many other kinds of standing committee research briefs
that are not being systematically indexed or shared (beyond stakeholder
submissions). For anyone who may be interested, I have posted some
details on my personal site:
http://seemysandbox.info/research_govDocs.php
I would love to hear from any of you for whom this topic might be
relevant. If anyone is working on something similar, please let me know!
Thanks,
Naomi
---
https://twitter.com/nominalie
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