Open Government Consultation: Weekly Summary Report - Week 2

During week 2 of Canada's Open Government consultation, some of the key messages we heard included:

• Respondents continue to express the importance of Government of Canada data in helping to better understand and evaluate the status of issues relevant to them (e.g., environmental impacts), in forming opinions, and in engaging with the Government from an informed perspective.
• Finding government data online could be made easier by:
  • making websites simple, user-friendly, and easy to navigate;
  • allowing datasets to be sorted based on popularity, and other social metrics;
  • providing more support for the user to navigate and use the data portal (e.g., instructional videos, etc.); and
  • using semantic web principles.
• In order to find government information online easily, information should be organized from the perspective of the user. A precise and complete index should be provided, information should be classified in ways that make sense to the public (e.g., structured by levels and fields of research, using word clouds, etc.), and the amount of metadata used to classify the information should be increased.
• The Government of Canada should reach out to Canadians by making consultations as inclusive, and easy to find, as possible. Consultation methods such as 'crowdsourcing' and holding 'plebiscites' to probe citizens' thoughts and opinions on key issues should be considered.
• Strong support for leveraging social media tools was noted, along with the importance of learning best practices from others.
• Approaches to open government demonstrated by Canadian provinces and municipalities (e,g., British Columbia, Toronto, Montreal, etc.) should be reviewed to identify best practices. Similarly, lessons learned by other countries, such as Australia, France, and the member countries of the Open Government Partnership may provide Canada with solutions to model and leverage.
• Consultations such as this are much appreciated, and the Government of Canada should continue to engage Canadians in becoming part of the decision-making process.

A Twitter chat about open government was held on December 15, 2011. Here are the transcript of the English discussion, which used #opengovchat as a hashtag, and the transcript of the French discussion, which used the #parlonsgouvert hashtag.