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Re: The 2013 Open Data Census submission and review is ready to go!

Posted by Tracey P. Lauriault on Sep 28, 2013; 6:46am
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/Re-Open-data-census-The-2013-Open-Data-Census-submission-and-review-is-ready-to-go-tp6204p6217.html

Christian!  the ever so wonderful Irina is here and we had a great talk! I 'll be spending the day with the Irish crew here, Ireland crew and we may have some ideas.

I understand your efforts and constraints more.  

Cheers
T

On Friday, September 27, 2013, Christian Villum wrote:
Hi Tracey,

Thanks as always for your input, I'll reply inline below.

-Christian

-- 

Christian Villum

Community Manager, Open Government Data + Local Groups Network
skype: christianvillum  |  @villum
The Open Knowledge Foundation
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On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 7:30 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <<a href="javascript:_e({}, &#39;cvml&#39;, &#39;tlauriau@gmail.com&#39;);" target="_blank">tlauriau@...> wrote:
Thank you Christian;

I just went to take a look and I can see that you provided a new comment box, excellent, however, there was also a request for

Yes No For Some Jurisdictions Unsure and to have a place for notes right there.  For example, on the transportation question, sure you can get a paper schedule for most, but for us in Canada, as previously discussed, transit is not delivered by a central national authority, it is deliverly by cities and municipalities.  If we decided to narrow things a bit, from 3500 cities, and decide to pick all cities over 100 000 people, then we would be down to about 37 cities, then we would have to assess at that level.  For each of your questions.  For the time being we would have to respond unsure for all, and write this big long note to you.

I understand, it's a complicated situation. Did you by any chance include this comment in the submission also? I think that would be appropriate and useful.
 
In addition, Statistics Canada just sent Diane and I a note requesting that we up the score for Statistical Data, see the correspondence below. 

Thanks for giving them such detailed feedback, it's exemplary Country Editor work.
 
Again, the way the government is structured we can say yes to some, but must say no to others.  For example, might be yes for some at the federal level, not all departments, but then when we get to provinces and territories, then the issue becomes very problematic.  Think of Canada as you would the EU in terms of federated jurisdictions with different ways of doing things.

Yes, this is surely one of the bigger issues, as also discussed before. I am confident that this is one of the issues we'll be looking into post-OGP when addressing how to expand the Census.
 
I tried to participate in the WG remotely, but as you were aware, the wifi issue was problematic. 

Yes, I am sorry for the faulty connection - the venue of the conference was unable to handle the number of connections, and the remote linkups to sessions suffered from that. Thanks for trying though!
 
I am not sure how we can work with this new version, as wonderful as it might be for those who have centralized national governments who do all of these things.

How can I help improve this with you so that we can have a more nuanced picture of the results?  I would be so happy to participate in a working groups of sorts.

That's great! Stay tuned here on the list, where we'll have the discussion booted after the OGP summit.
  
Sincerely
Tracey

StatCan correspondence below:

Andrew;

Some of Statistics Canada data are under that licence, most are not.  For example, economic division, environment, health, crime and so on are not nor are population projections, death rates, birth rates and so on are not under that licence. If you wish to have cross tabs on the free data, that is at a very large cost, as that is considered a custom order, of if you want data aggregated to boundaries such as wards, neighbourhoods or health districts, that also is a very hight cost.  In addition, our current government cancelled the census, as you know, the free data from the national household survey are considered unreliable and uneven and do not scale down to smaller geographies due to the methodology adapted.  Statistics Canada made the census data free, real census data as they had recovered the costs from earlier sales, what they made free were these NHS which are of much less quality and ealier census data only.

What is available via the portal is a small sample of what the statistical agency holds, and in fact, for real data practioners and users, we do not go to the portal as the search functionality is terrible.  The system in place does not scale well.  Most people still go to the statistics canada website as you have the data with the methodological guides, the surveys and so on, the information surrounding the data.  In theory a centralized portal seems nice, but the reality is, in the case of Canada anyway, there is a distance created between the data producer and the user when the data are centralized in this way, which means you loose context and access to the specialists who can answer questions.  Also, the geographic search for the data are lost in this centralized portal.  So it is not the best way.

Furthermore, that is only one agency, there is citizenship, hrsdc, industry, and so on who all produce statistical data as well as administrative data and their data are not in the portal as they should be nor are they available from their site.  The ranking is not just for Statcan it is for statistical data in general.

I think the score should remain the same, and in fact, if we actually had access to the inventory of datasets produced by the federal government, we may consider lowering this score even more, as only a small sample of actually produced federal data are in that portal.  Finally, with the decimation of Library and Archives Canada, access to historical data are now impeded.

Until which time that all data are open, I think this score has to stay.

Thank you for bringing it up howerver.
Sincerely
Tracey



On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 4:58 PM, <[hidden email]> wrote:
Hello Diane, Tracey and Patricia,
 
As you are listed as editors for Canada for the OKFN Open Data Census, we are contacting you regarding updates to the OKFN website.
 
The National Statistics section for Canada in the G8 OKFN Open Data Census has a mark of 3/6. The reasoning for that mark is that Canadian national statistics are not openly licensed and free.
 
This is outdated information, the data on the Statistics Canada website is free and openly licensed since 2012. The licence is available here:
 
Also the data is freely available through the Open Data portal data.gc.ca for all federal statistics and is also covered under the Open Government Licence found here: http://data.gc.ca/eng/open-government-licence-canada
 
 
Would you contact or update the OKFN website to reflect these changes and increase the mark?
 
 
Thank you,
Andrew
 
 
Andrew Smith



--
Tracey P. Lauriault
http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
http://datalibre.ca/


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