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Government Launches Open Gov Initiative

One day after formally launching a Canadian open data portal, the federal governmental on Friday unveiled a new Open Government initative. The Open Gov initiative includes three prongs: open data, open information, and open dialogue. The most noteworthy change is a new requirement that all government departments must proactively release summaries of access to information requests. Canadians can use the information to informally request a copy of the released documents. This is a good step, though it falls short of reinstating the CAIRS database (which provided access all ATI requests) or making the full text of ATI requests readily available, as the UK has proposed doing.

One Comment

  1. Francois Marier says:

    Missing “prongs”
    They seem to be missing two very important aspects of Open Gov: Open Standards and Open Source.

    It’s one thing to release data, but if it’s in a format that nobody can use (technically or legally) or if it requires software that a good portion of citizens won’t have then it’s certainly not as useful as it could be.