Data Liberation
I recently stumbled across Statistic Canada's Data Liberation Initiative. It's exciting to see this effort and terminology, which is shared with Google's humorously themed effort.
The Data Liberation Facebook group provides some good reasons this is important — Do you want fair pricing, transparent testing, faster performance, deeper analytics and straight answers? Simply, in my mind, public data and even rights to code you access (like AGPL) should be a competitive factor, and in the public service or for anything of massive utility (like Facebook), something we expect.
The only problem is the Government's DLI is way too narrow. Right now it's aimed at post secondary institutions. There shouldn't be access categories, the same information should be available to 14 year olds and retired persons that's available to academics or public workers. As well, it's hardly a liberation effort when individuals have to pay to access the information. I don't think this we can really say participation and issues such as anti corruption are being seriously addressed until that state is reached, and no statements about "our children" can be taken seriously. Once this kind of data is released, we can expect greater participation and new forms of employment through crowd sourcing and volunteer efforts. There are plenty of civic minded, hobbyist or retired persons who would love to understand work on big problems, and with computers and the Internet any one person or group can achieve so much in spare time.
I know plenty of individuals and groups who can benefit from this data. After taking a run at it with a friend (and ultimately failing), Michael Mulley has finally got a parliament Hansard scraper working, but the amount of effort and reliability will be in jeopardy until this information is intentionally shared.