Citizens ask for access to public data

The New Brunswick government and its universities are coming under pressure from citizens to make more raw data available to the public.

Many governments in Canada and around the world have embraced the so-called open data agenda and have freed up raw data to citizens so they can arrange public information in useful ways and collaborate with others to better understand the numbers.

Now, New Brunswick citizens and companies are arguing the government and universities should stop holding back similar information.

Shawn Peterson built the website — propertize.ca — because he wanted to compare his property tax assessment with his neighbours. 

It's now online and contains easy to find data for the entire province.

"I'd like to take it forward and be able to expand it into other provinces," he said.

He's taken public information and made it easy to use. But Peterson has also taken something for nothing and turned a profit.

Those pushing for more access to data have other ideas of how information can be used.

City buses could be tracked through smartphones, potholes could be reported and a city could notify people when they were fixed and snowplows could be monitored so people don’t have to shovel twice.

'We have technology today that enables for much easier citizen engagement, and citizen engagement in a much smarter way.' — Patrick Lacroix, T4G

Patrick Lacroix, the managing director for the Fredericton-based company T4G, said there are many ways that the open data agenda could actually make life easier for citizens and allow communities to become more democratic.

"We have technology today that enables for much easier citizen engagement, and citizen engagement in a much smarter way," he said.

Peterson said the potential applications and business models are only limited by the amount of information governments are willing to make public.

Open data sites

While the New Brunswick government is being pressured to start freeing up data for its citizens, the federal government is already moving in that direction.

The federal government announced last month that it is easing restrictions on the use of the taxpayer-funded data it makes available to the public.

The federal government’s open data portal collates 260,000 data sets that span everything from immigration statistics to mapping co-ordinates.

When Treasury Board President Tony Clement made the announcement, he said he had not heard yet of anyone doing anything creative with the federal government data made available to date. But he said the federal government was "liberalizing" the approach to opening up data.

He said the new rules would "make it easier for innovation to occur."

Open data sites are not simply the domain of the federal government. The British Columbia government also has an open data site.

That page lists recent health data, information about visitor attendance at provincial parks and salary information for civil servants who earn more than $75,000.