Clad in a sweater over his shirt and tie, the self-described “public policy entrepreneur” just wants to open things up. But it’s not hard to imagine that could make some people a little nervous.
Eaves’ cause is about as geeky-sounding as they can get. He wants data, and he told the Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics Committee on Parliament Hill Monday that they had better give it to him—or, more accurately, everyone—or else.
“New data is like the plankton of our ecosystem, the economy, in the 21st century. So if you starve that system of plankton, or another system has more of it, they’re going to thrive more,” explained Eaves, a world-renowned expert on open government.
Data is what it sounds like—spreadsheets of numbers that computers can read. But what you can do with the data is where it gets interesting, such as uncover tax evasion, or create a mobile phone app that ties restaurant reviews with health code violations.
Or sign up for email reminders of garbage day, particularly when that day changes due to a statutory holiday. Municipalities that share transit data allow their citizens to google map routes without having to connect the dots on barely legible fold-up transit maps.
But it is the ideas that no one has even thought of where the big money could be.
Between criticizing the government for holding onto numbers that taxpayers paid to collect and appealing to the committee that open data was key to economic prosperity in the digital age, Eaves took the time to explain the terminology a bit and make sure everyone was on the same page.
Under the umbrella phrase of “open government,” the definition of which is nebulous, are three core ideas: open data, open information, and open processes. Open data refers basically to numbers, open information refers to the reports people write based on those numbers, and open processes refer to the ways government goes about making decisions and getting things done.
Eaves wasn’t interested in talking about open information and processes on Monday. He wanted digits—lots of them, like the data collected in the census and other government institutions.
He noted that much of this data is requested regularly through Access to Information requests and money could be saved by just publishing it freely.
But money could also be saved by uncovering poor spending or fraud. Britain has charged full speed into open data in hopes it can crowd-source citizens into helping them uncover ways to cut costs or find efficiencies as austerity measures become essential.
A friend of Eaves asked the Canada Revenue Agency for data to help assess charities in Toronto, and in playing with the numbers uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars in tax evasion by fake charities.
“On a lark, they asked one day why they didn’t just sort these charities by the number of tax receipts issued,” he said. “When they did that, something astounding happened. United Way is the single largest charity in the Toronto area. It generally raises about $100 million a year. Yet the United Way only placed third on this list.”
Two larger “charities” had issued $160 million and $230 million in tax receipts, and six of the top 15 charities were unknown.
He said if the CRA’s data were open, someone would have found that problem much earlier or it never would have happened because scammers would have been too afraid of getting caught.
Sometimes the government does share data, but the format makes it pointless. Like giving out printed documents numbering in the thousands of pages.
“One of the most powerful things about the digital media is that they’re searchable. When you dump 3,000 printed-out documents on to me, you are effectively not releasing those documents to me. Am I really to go through 3,000 different pieces of paper and find the relevant piece of information?”
Rather than printed documents or PDFs, data should be shared in formats that can be easily manipulated, like spreadsheets.
Eaves said something like the widget the government has created to let people know about product recalls is virtually useless because no one is going to install it on their blog and check it daily. A better solution would be to share the data in some kind of API (application programming interface.)
“If you did that, then supermarkets could build it into their systems. So if somebody accidentally stocks something, the moment it gets bar-coded, it would ring because the product has been recalled. People now with their iPhones can actually use the camera to scan a barcode to find out how much something costs and where it’s cheaper. You could get a message right then saying the product has been recalled.”
That could save money in health care expenses and might catch problems stores and distributors miss, ensuring products get sent back rather than shipped all over the place.
“The federal government has data that is enormously interesting to the public and enormously interesting to industry, and yet shares it in this very closed way, where you can only use it on their terms.”
Australia, the United States, and Britain are all leaving Canada in the digital backwaters. While we share a few hundred data sets, they are gearing up to share thousands. The U.S. already shares some 200,000, and unlike Canada there are no licences or copyright restrictions on that data that keeps people from doing useful things with it.
One only needs to look at the weather to know how big a deal this is, said Eaves. Both the U.S. and Canada share weather data and in the U.S. that generates $2 billion a year.
“The amount of wealth generated by weather data is almost incomprehensible. ... If we began to imagine what is possible with the hundreds of thousands of data sets that you have at your disposal, I can think of an economy that is much more resilient, much more vibrant than the one we have now.”
Eaves wants Canada to learn from what those other countries are doing and said if we don’t, we could pay the price in inefficiencies and lack of innovation later.
The committee’s study into open government continued to call witnesses on Wednesday.
