About

Hi. I'm David. Welcome to one of my hobbies, a voluntary site I'm collaboratively creating with a small group of friends and, I hope, a growing community that you may want to join. We built this site because, as citizens, we want our governments to open up and share their data, in useful, structured formats that people can actually use or analyze. Unlike our American and British peers, the Canadian Federal (and provincial...) government(s) currently have no official, coordinated effort to release government data. We think that should change.

But rather than complain, we thought we'd do something. This is our effort. A stab at showing our government, and Canada, what a federal open data portal could and should look like.

Our Goals

  • Be an innovative platform that can demonstrate to government how they should share data.
  • Show citizens and politicians which Federal Ministries are striving to share data and be transparent, and which are not.
  • Bring together government data in one place to both make it easier to find.

Future Plans

In addition to the functionality you already see on this site we hope, in the near future, to be able to:

  • Respond to other requests to make this site better from the developer community
  • Point to applications and mashups that use open government data
  • Host data sets (where licenses permit) and offer APIs

Who are some of the people behind this site?

The development team includes a number of people including the people at Raised Eyebrow Web Studio, Luke Closs, and a number of fantastic coders from the Open Knowledge Foundation. There are also some great people over at the Datadotgc.ca Google Group who have helped scrape data, tested for bugs and been supportive in lots of nice ways.

Technical Information

This site is powered by Drupal and CKAN (the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, which is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation). The interactive data tables & maps you see on some data sets are powered by Microsoft's open-source OGDI (Open Government Data Initiative).

Related Sites

Some other websites you might be interested in:

Canadian Open Government

International Open Government

We took a lot of inspiration from these sites, who are doing phenomenal work beyond Canada's borders.

This is not an official Government of Canada website. Rather, it’s a collaborative effort by a group of citizens who want our governments to open their data — in useful, structured formats — so we’re showing them how it could be done.

This site is powered by Drupal and CKAN (the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, which is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation), with interactive data tables & maps running on Microsoft's open-source OGDI (Open Government Data Initiative). You can read more about the project here.