Science Library Pad

short update on Ontario Open Data Portal

Short as in one tweet long.  Still in early stages, says @OntInnovation.

@OntInnovation OntarioInnovation

@citizensuite @scilib @marsdd Still in early stages. But here's shining eg. of great work we're seeing ontario.ca/zej5 @MNRcentral

22 Nov via web

Here's a Storify of the thread:

Previously:

June 14, 2011 open data project manager sought for Ontario
June 6, 2011 open data for the Province of Ontario

Treasury Board President Clement speaks about open government, social media

President of the Treasury Board Tony Clement spoke at PS Engage 2011, introducing new guidelines on social media and reiterating his enthusiasm for an innovative public service as part of an open government.

Collaboration

What does collaboration mean in the context of your work?

You can look at it any number of ways. But in order to have the greatest impact on an open and modern Public Service, collaboration must be about knowledge-sharing.

This means exchanging information, engaging in dialogue and working together. This is about enhancing our productivity which, in turn, makes Canada more competitive in the global economy.

Technology

Internet-based tools are allowing public servants to be more productive than ever, by sharing information and communicating with Canadians more effectively and efficiently than even a few years ago.

The potential for greater knowledge-sharing is there.

...

There is a tremendous opportunity now to take the tools of information technology and make government faster, more effective and more efficient. I believe the Public Service can enhance core government business such as program and service delivery, and even policy-making, with the right technology tools.

...

Let’s not underestimate technology’s profound effect on the workplace – in government and beyond.

Faster technology, a more connected world, wider networks and complex problems will make teamwork and collaboration required skills.  

Public servants will have to be savvy in their efforts to modernize their workplace. A modern workplace can have a tremendous positive impact on the overall performance of the Public Service and on a renewed organizational culture.

Innovation

As President of the Treasury Board, I consider myself the minister responsible for championing innovation within government. I want you to help me achieve the goal of a Public Service of the future.

Open Government and Open Data

In Canada, Open Government is being pursued through three main streams:

• Open Data, which is about offering government data in more useful and machine readable formats;
• Open Information, which is about proactively releasing information to Canadians on an ongoing basis; and
• Open Dialogue, which gives Canadians a greater chance to input into the work of government

As part of our leadership role in increasing transparency and accountability, Canada has signalled its intent to join the international Open Government Partnership. This important initiative was launched by the United States and Brazil and aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.

Social Media

The Government encourages the use of new Web 2.0 tools and technologies such as blogs, wikis, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These tools help create a more modern, open and collaborative workplace and lead to more "just-in-time" communications with the public.

The [newly released] social media guidelines and policies will lead to improved interaction between Canadians and their government.

Web 2.0 tools and services provide additional means of interactive communications. They are the modern-day equivalents of "town halls" and are being used for various purposes including recruitment, emergency communications, service delivery, stakeholder outreach and as tools for collaboration and consultation.

Access to technology and the Internet

Clement also said, although it is not reflected in the online notes, that it makes no sense for employees to have more access to technology and the web at the coffeeshop than at work.  (My paraphrase was "makes no sense for employees to have more access to tech in the coffeshop than at work", @PSEngage paraphrased as "PS should not have better connectivity on their way to work than at the office".)

References & Further Info

Tony Clement tweets @TonyClementCPC

• PR for his announcement: Minister Clement highlights Open Government and new technology at PSEngage
• full text of his speech
• Guideline for External Use of Web 2.0
• Canada's open government site: http://open.gc.ca/
• Canada's commitment to the Open Government Partnership: http://www.opengovpartnership.org/countries/canada

Thanks to @stourang for quickly tweeting links to newly-posted TBS pages.

The Minister was speaking at the Public Sector Engage (PS Engage) conference, hashtag #PSE2011.

Previously:

October 19, 2011  Treasury Board President Clement speaks about open government at GTEC

international open data hack days

Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) will be December 3 & 4, 2011.

It's a global collaboration with the possibility of local events.

It happens that International Open Data Hackathon also falls on December 3, 2011.  It is focused on getting cities to host hackathon events.

Ottawa is hosting one at City Hall, you can register for free

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2488780008/

It's not just a technical event, it's about bringing everyone with an interest in open data, open government, and citizen engagement together so we can exchange ideas and make stuff.

The hashtags are #rhok and #odhd

Twitter retweets - how to drink less from the firehose

Twitter has a rather well-buried feature that lets you control the retweets that you see in your twitterstream.

As far as I know this can only be done through the GUI, I don't see it listed as a Twitter command.

You can disable retweets per-user, that is, if you want to see text directly entered by someone, but not anything they just retweet, you can block seeing their retweets.

Login and go to the user profile (you can only do it per-user, not globally).

Find the small circle with "retweet cycle" arrows and click it (indicated with red arrow in image below).  Retweets done by this user will no longer show up in your timeline.  In the example below, if you clicked the circle, anything retweeted BY @scilib (me) wouldn't show up in your timeline any more.

There are also some search commands you can use with retweets.  Unfortunately there is almost no documentation.  Some appear to apply only to RT style retweets, some to both Twitter retweets and RTs.

You can try these parameters in a twitter search:

filter:retweets (show ONLY retweets)

-filter:retweets (everything EXCEPT retweets)

exclude:retweets (everything EXCEPT retweets)

include:retweets (include retweets)

Internet & social media - Official Languages examination - Senate Committee videos

The Senate Official Languages Committee is conducting an "Examination on the use of the Internet, new media and social media and the respect for Canadians’ language rights".

There have been two meetings so far and the next is scheduled for October 31, 2011.

The first meeting was on October 24, 2011.  Video and audio are available from ParlVU.  This meeting was with the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages.

Video format is Window Media Video (WMV).  In order to view this video on a Mac you will need to install Flip4Mac WMV (free).

Transcripts have not been posted yet.

The second meeting was on October 27, 2011.  Video and audio are available from ParlVU.  This meeting was with Treasury Board Secretariat.  Notably, President of the Treasury Board Tony Clement.

The discussions included social media, the Digital Economy Strategy, and open data.

iPolitics.ca did an article based on the meeting and post-meeting interviews: Twitter, Facebook and social media ‘critical’ to government, Clement says.  Some quotes from the article:

"It would be quite bizarre if we’re trying to hire the best and the brightest young people with great vitality coming into the public service and they’re used to having tethered tablets and instant social media feedback and they can do half of their work at the coffee shop without any difficulty and then suddenly they are transformed into a public servant and none of that is available. That would be a bizarre situation." - Tony Clement

...

Corinne Charette, the government’s chief information officer, said 66 federal government institutions now have bilingual twitter accounts and official government communications are presented in both official languages.

It’s also popular with government employees, she said.

“Social media is an exciting development. It is widely requested by public servants..."

...

Clement told senators he is also pushing ahead with his open data initiative, to get more raw data out of institutions like Statistics Canada and make it public.
“The more data we can get out there, the more applications can be thought of by brilliant people, entrepreneurs.”

The next meeting will be on October 31, 2011.  Live video and audio will be available from ParlVU.  The meeting will again be with Treasury Board Secretariat.

Witnesses

Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat

- Corinne Charette, Chief Information Officer of the Government of Canada

- Sue Lajoie, Senior Director, Community and Collaboration

- Ryan Androsoff, Senior Policy Advisor, Web 2.0, Community and Collaboration

- Marc Tremblay, Executive Director, Official Languages Centre of Excellence, Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer

The Senate tweets at @SenateCA / @senatCA

Hashtags (as declared in the Senate video stream) are #senCA and #OLLO

Twitter accounts:

• Tony Clement @TonyClementCPC
• Ryan Androsoff @RyanAndrosoff
• iPolitics.ca @iPoliticsca
• Elizabeth Thompson @LizT1

Previously:
October 19, 2011 Treasury Board President Clement speaks about open government at GTEC
January 28, 2011  open government in Canada [ETHI committee]

Here's a Storify of some of the Twitter traffic from October 27, 2011

Google data visualisation contest for French 2012 election

Concours Google de Dataviz

Tous les jours, un milliard de recherches sont effectuées sur Google, 140 millions de messages sont envoyés sur Twitter et 70 000 heures de vidéo sont mises en ligne sur YouTube. Vous croyez encore que les médias traditionnels suffiront pour vivre l'élection présidentielle ?

Libérez la puissance des données de Google et Twitter en développant une application web innovante pour suivre l'élection présidentielle française. Proposez un nouveau regard sur la campagne en réalisant une interface intelligente de visualisation de données.

La meilleure application sera intégrée à la chaîne YouTube dédiée à la campagne présidentielle.

https://sites.google.com/site/concoursdataviz2012/ - short URL goo.gl/N2i2E - hashtag #googleviz

Date limite: 07 décembre 2011

8. Critères d’admissibilité/éligibilité
Les critères d’admissibilité d’une Application sont définis comme suit. L’Application doit

•  Être une application interactive
•  Utiliser a minima un jeu de données provenant de Google ou de Twitter.
•  Éclairer de façon perspicace et originale la campagne présidentielle 2012
•  Rester en ligne et pertinente jusqu’à la fin de l’élection présidentielle 2012
•  Être au format 960 x 785 pixels maximum
•  Être en langue française
•  Etre portée par une équipe comportant entre 1 et 4 personnes

from Le règlement

Contest is open worldwide but submissions must be in French for a French public.

@dataveyes is organising the contest.

Here's a Storify of a few related tweets:

CISTI / DataCite Canada - presentations for Open Access Week 2011

Two presentations for Open Access Week 2011:

Introduction to DataCite Canada

Karen Morgenroth (CISTI) & Wendy Watkins (Data Centre- Library); Monday, October 24, 2011; 2:00-3:00pm; Room 235 Library [Carleton U, Ottawa]

...

Karen Morgenroth will discuss DataCite Canada's technical solutions for registration. It will also look at DataCite Canada's beta project with several Canadian data centres, including Carleton University.

Carleton's pilot involves the Millennium Scholarship Foundation Research Data holdings, a unique and valuable collection rescued by the Data Centre. Wendy Watkins will provide an overview of the resource, its importance to scholarlship and the progress of the project to date.  Assigning persistent identifiiers to this collection will mean that scholars and students will be able to find and use the resource in the future.

from Carleton Library - Scholarly Communications: OA Events

Also see this document (PDF) from CARL with information about registering for in-person or webcast.

Open Access to Data: New Initiatives and the Challenges of Data Management

Date: Thursday, October 27.   Time: 1:00-3:00

Location: Ante Chamber 3129DV,  U of T Mississauga.

Join us for a panel presentation and discussion of new initiatives and challenges associated with opening access to national, regional, municipal and research data.

...

Panel members: 

• Steve Czajka, OLS, OLIP, Supervisor, Information Planning, City of Mississauga Planning and Building Department, Policy Planning Division
• Ron Jaros MES, MCIP, RPP, OLS, OLIP, Planning Manager, Information and Intelligence Team, Region of Peel
• Diane Carley, Digital Initiatives Analyst,  Project Manager - DataCite Canada, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information
• Andrew Nicholson, GIS and Data Librarian U of T Mississauga Library  
• Berenica Vejvoda, Data Librarian, Data Liberation Initiative Representative, Map & Data Library University of Toronto Libraries.

from University of Toronto (Mississauga) - Join Us for 2011 Events

For other events from Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) members, see 2011 Events @ CARL Libraries.

Twitter:

• Karen Morgenroth @kmorgenroth
• Diane Carley @dianecarley
• DataCite Canada @datacitecanada
• DataCite @datacite

datacatalogs.org - one (data) catalogue to bind them all

I wrote in January about the problem of a proliferation of different sites with inventories of open data catalogues, each site with its own omissions and issues: open data - who shall catalogue the catalogues?

Via the open-government mailing list I learn there is now a comprehensive effort to unify this information on a single curated site:

http://datacatalogs.org/

for example, here's the entry for the City of Ottawa: http://datacatalogs.org/catalog/ottawa_ca

You can also see the list of site curators at http://datacatalogs.org/about

Ottawa cycling map open data

The good news: the City of Ottawa has been steadily increasing its support for cycling, including a dedicated bike lane trial downtown.

The bad news: the official cycling map site, http://www.capitalcyclingmap.ca/ is awful, with incredibly awkward pre-GoogleMaps navigation and no real interactivity.

The good news: the city has released its bike routes data on its open data site, so now anyone can make a better map, apps, and integrate the cycle map info onto websites.  (There was an initial glitch with the release, but the files are now up.)

Ottawa Open Data Catalogue - Ottawa Cycling Network

formats available are KML (Google Earth format), SHP and DWG. 

Here's a wide view of the KML data (the cyan grid lines and other colours layered around Ottawa in the centre - Ottawa covers a huge area):

Ottawa's Mayor, Jim Watson, is a cycling supporter and does a good job of interacting on Twitter. Here's a little Storify of how things spread through Twitter:

Canadian G4 open data cities presentation at GTEC

Just a quick Storify of my livetweeting of a GTEC panel

Treasury Board President Clement speaks about open government at GTEC

GTEC is a big annual IT tradeshow/conference for the federal government in Ottawa.

Tony Clement, President of the Treasury Board, did the opening keynote.

I like to tell people that when I was Industry minister, I was responsible for Canadian innovation. Now that I am President of the Treasury Board, I want to champion innovation in government.

...

a government that takes on the challenge to be a global leader in openness, transparency and security.  We have already taken some steps towards making that government a reality. But there is much more to do.

...

We can transform the way we do business by harnessing IT in new ways—including

• An understanding of the value of social media tools, as a way to bridge the distance between government and Canadians; and
• A further commitment to all three streams of Open Government—Open Data, Open Information and Open Dialogue.

Our Government is committed to offering Canadians greater opportunities to learn about and participate in government, in the economy, and in our democratic process. They will have greater access to data from federal departments and be able to find, download and use information they want more easily.

Our Open Government activities are detailed at www.open.gc.ca, where we describe actions to strengthen Open Data, Open Information and Open Dialogue. We will post information about new activities as they are undertaken.

As announced last March, starting in 2012, all departments and agencies subject to the Access to Information Act will be required to post summaries of completed information requests on their websites.

Canada will soon have the chance to step on the world stage as a leader in Open Government. We were one of the countries to signal our intent to participate in an international Open Government Partnership.

As part of our leadership role in increasing governmental transparency and accountability, Canada has joined the international Open Government Partnership. This important initiative was launched by the United States and Brazil and aims to secure concrete commitments from other governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.

Having joined the partnership, we will be delivering an Open Government plan informed by broad consultation by March 2012.

Being part of this partnership will offer Canada a means to connect internationally through its Open Government agenda. This will be an opportunity for Canadian companies to showcase their innovations.

In the long term, open governments and economies will pay dividends for our business sector. They also stand to have an impact on Canadian society in general: increasing transparency, accountability and citizen engagement.

from Notes for remarks by the President of the Treasury Board - Speech for GTEC 2011 Canada's Government Technology Event - October 18, 2011

Notable is his specific committment to an Open Government plan for Canada by March 2012.

This is a reiteration of our existing commitment to the Open Government Partnership - the country page for Canada has a letter of intent from Minister Baird and the text "Country Action Plan coming in March 2012".

Tony Clement tweets at @TonyClementCPC

The Open Government Partnership is @opengovpart

and GTEC is on Twitter @GTEC and hashtag #gtec

Here is a Storify (my tweets along with a couple from Tony Clement):

Previously:
June 3, 2011  open data in 2011 Canadian Speech from the Throne
June 1, 2011  open data statement in Canadian Digital Economy Strategy update
May 20, 2011  open data supported by Treasury President Clement

OC Transpo (Ottawa transit) statement on open data

The following statement was released today, August 31, 2011:

OC Transpo is committed to delivering information meeting today’s transit user needs. We also support the Open Data initiative and as part of it are working at improving our real-time bus position data, which should be completed in the near future.

as part of the real-time information with new [SMS] 560560 Next Bus Arrivals service announcement.

I am hoping that OC Transpo will support the Google GTFS-realtime transit info specification.

For more information on City of Ottawa open data you can follow the city's internal lead @rob_giggey , as well as the citizen advocacy group @opendataottawa (of which I am a member).

The city's start page for the topic is ottawa.ca/opendata

Québec - Consultation publique Web 2.0

The Province of Quebec has an online consultation about Web 2.0

Comment le gouvernement du Québec peut-il exploiter le Web 2.0 – réseautage social, sites wiki, applications composites (mashups), blogues – pour améliorer la qualité des services aux citoyens et son efficacité interne?

http://www.consultationgautrinweb2.gouv.qc.ca/

There's also tweeting from @GautrinWeb2 and use of the hashtag #GautrinWeb2

I encourage you to provide your opinions and votes in their ideas market (they're using the IdeaScale platform).

However, I think there are a lot of issues with these kind of broad-based open-ended ideas market public consultations.  In general the participation level is low and the ideas are all over the map. 

I am strongly in favour of government finding new ways to open up to citizens, I just think we have to be mindful about the types of consultations and technologies we use, and our expectations for them.

With low participation levels, it's easy to game the system (that is, for a particular interest group to get their ideas voted to the top).  You need to get into the thousands or tens of thousands of users for an open consultation before someone can sway the results just by reaching out to the members of their personal social network or broader professional networks.

These are the current response levels for the consultation, running since July 25, 2011:

51 idées soumises, 192 commentaires, 519 votes, 181 utilisateurs

UK gov consults public on open data

How should government become even more open? Consultations on #opendata and public data corporation http://bit.ly/oMqsfC #openuk

tweet from @cabinetofficeuk

Francis Maude said: 

"The UK Government is determined to have the most ambitious open data agenda of any government in the world. We demonstrated that ambition recently through the Prime Minister’s open letter.  But we want to embed this approach throughout the public service and we want to hear from people about how they think we should do this”.

Cabinet Office - How should Government become even more open?

The two consultations are

• Making Open Data Real: A Public Consultation - also see http://data.gov.uk/opendataconsultation
• Consultation on Data Policy for a Public Data Corporation

deadline is October 27, 2011

The open data consultation also has a paper covering the major issues

We are now taking the concept of 'Open Data' and exploring an approach that could make this the operating principle of our public services. In the modern age, accessibility of low cost Information and Communications Technology (ICT), including cloud computing and high levels of ICT literacy mean that it is relatively low cost for governments to share the 'by-products' of public services with everyone.

https://update.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files/resources/open-data-consultation.pdf

Previously:

July 7, 2011  update on open data in the United Kingdom

Google Scholar adds personal profiles displaying citations

I guess the "make everything social" decree went out to Google Scholar as well.

There is now essentially a scholarly social network built in - individual user profiles displaying citations, links to colleagues.

Today we’re introducing Google Scholar Citations: a simple way for you to compute your citation metrics and track them over time.

...

You can enable automatic addition of your newly published articles to your profile. This would instruct the Google Scholar indexing system to update your profile as it discovers new articles that are likely yours. And you can, of course, manually update your profile by adding missing articles, fixing bibliographic errors, and merging duplicate entries.

You can also create a public profile with your articles and citation metrics

Google Scholar Blog - Google Scholar Citations - July 20, 2011

There's more information at http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/citations.html

Citations is in limited release, you have to sign up on a waiting list, usual procedures.

Here is the profile for Anurag Acharya: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=nGEWZbkAAAAJ&hl=en

Previously:
November 20, 2004  Google Scholar  (my first mention of Scholar, shortly after it was launched)

open data from the Province of British Columbia

site is live

http://data.gov.bc.ca/

Blog at http://blog.data.gov.bc.ca/ (under "Connect" on the main page).

Twitter account @Data_BC

Thoughts from David Eaves

the license is good. Obviously my preference would be for everything to be unlicensed and in the public domain as it is in the United States. Short of that however, the most progressive license out there is the UK Government’s Open Government License for Public Sector Information. Happily the BC government has essentially copied it.

eaves.ca - Province of BC launches Open Data Catalog: What works - July 19, 2011

Vancouver Sun data journalist Chad Skelton has asked for the public to help him find datasets of interest

@chadskelton Looking for juicy datasets on new B.C. #OpenData site. If you find one, please let me know
http://twitter.com/chadskelton/status/93356790091223040

BC Premier Christy Clark did a video about the site and about open government in general.

email, the killer app that is unkillable

E-mail is not an optimal tool for many types of collaboration, but it is very difficult to get people to move away from using email.  In fact it's difficult to get people to send less email and to stop checking their inbox every six seconds.

Two salient quotes from a recent >Globe and Mail article

“The real problem of e-mail is people, and people are not a solvable problem.” [quote from Merlin Mann of InboxZero.com]

---

In one 2001 study, [Thomas Jackson] found that employees reacted to 70 per cent of incoming e-mails within six seconds of their arrival. Dr. Jackson calls it “an addiction.” Problematically, it took them 64 seconds to recover their train of thought after the interruption, a dismal stat considering numerous e-mails flowed in every five minutes.

Globe and Mail - Confessions of an inbox obsessive - July 15, 2011

The article mentions the Email Charter proposed by TED's Chris Anderson.

SIDEBAR: Call for translation.  I'd like to link to the Email Charter from my work email, but as the government is bilingual, I can only do that if someone translates the Charter into French.

Here's what I tweeted

would like to see email charter http://emailcharter.org/ aussi en français so I could link it from my GC email sig. Any volunteers? #w2p

ENDSIDEBAR

DataCite conference - Data and the Scholarly Record: the Changing Landscape - Aug 2011

DataCite will hold its second Summer Meeting on August 24th and 25th [2011] at the historic Shattuck Plaza Hotel in Berkeley, California. The Summer Meeting will be a 1.5 day event and is open to all. You can register at:
http://datacite2011.eventbrite.com/

DataCite blog - DataCite Summer Meeting “Data and the Scholarly Record: the Changing Landscape” - June 30, 2011

DataCite is a service for providing permanent DOIs to data sets, in particular to enable consistent citation of data sets in the scientific literature.

There are many international partners in DataCite, CISTI's role is to establish DataCite Canada.

EU open data portal call for tender - result will be open source

The development of the portal by the contractor will take over the prototype portal presently under development by Commission services, based on LAMP stack, DRUPAL and CKAN. The development by the contractor will be based on the practical experience gathered in the operation of the prototype portal, with a view to quickly gain evidence and guidance necessary for engineering a robust system to be operated on a continued basis.

The contractor will develop the portal infrastructure as an open source project whose source code will be published on OSOR (http://osor.eu) or another widely known open source repository.

The portal will be part of the European Commission Europa pages (homepage URL:ec.europa.eu/data), and it will be consistent with the Europa visual identity policy.

from Tender Specifications - Implementation of a European Commission Open Data Portal (PDF)

deadline is September 19, 2011

info from Call for tenders: implementation of European Commission Open Data portal - SMART 2011/0050

via ePSI Platform - EC now tendering for Open Data Portal

via Twitter @epsiplatform

Nigel Shadbolt (@Nigel_Shadbolt) has written a report, available on Scribd - Towards a pan EU data portal – data.gov.eu (via ePSI Platform - Towards an EU Data Portal).

Reminder: I have used tag open data for blog posts on this topic - there's lots of activity worldwide, from national governments, sub-national governments, libraries, and international organisatins.

Bibliothèque nationale de France - open data and Semantic Web

The open data portal is live at

http://data.bnf.fr/

There is also information about their use of linked data (semantic web) at

http://data.bnf.fr/semanticweb

Info via @arthurlutz Arthur Lutz and @davidbgk

RT @davidbgk: Tiens, le portail #OpenData de la BNF est propulsé par CubicWeb :) data.bnf.fr/semanticweb

retweeted by @LiberTIC

BNF social media presence

blogs - http://blog.bnf.fr/

notably their digital library blog Gallica http://blog.bnf.fr/gallica/

which has an accompanying Twitter account @GallicaBnF

via their Twitter list of BnF accounts @GallicaBnF/bnf I find there is also a BnF labs account and blog

@LaboBnF

http://labobnf.blogspot.com/

The main library doesn't appear to have a Twitter account, but it does have a Facebook page, as well as a presence on French video sharing site DailyMotion and YouTube

Facebook - BnF - Bibliothèque nationale de France

DailyMotion - BNF

YouTube - BibliothequeBnF