Teresa Scassa - Blog

The goals of the open government movement – which has spread rapidly around the world in the last five years – are to increase government transparency and accountability, to engage citizens and increase their participation in government, and to improve governance. This is to be done primarily through enhanced access to government information and improved methods of citizen-government interaction. Open government includes three main streams: open access, open data, and open participation. The open data stream also carries with it the goal to stimulate innovation and economic development by making government data available in reusable and interoperable formats and under open licences.

Canada signed on to the Open Government Partnership in 2011. In doing so, it committed to taking a number of steps, including developing an Action Plan for open government that would set out specific goals and commitments. The OGP also requires governments to report on their progress, and provides independent review of each government’s updates.

Canada’s Action Plan for Open Government set out a series of commitments spread over a 3 year period. It was published in 2012 and Canada submitted its first self-assessment report to the OGP in 2013. This progress report has been the subject of an independent review by the OGP, through its independent reporting mechanism, and a copy of this review is now available for public comment.

The independent review confirms that the Canadian government has made significant progress on a number of the commitments it set out in its Action Plan, and that many of these commitments are either on target or ahead of schedule. Some of these achievements are considered to be “clearly relevant” to the values of the OGP and of potentially high impact. These include the completion and launch of a new Open Government Licence (commented on in an earlier blog post), measures taken under the International Aid Transparency Initiative, the online publication of resource management data, and the electronic publication by federal regulators of regulatory plans.

The review, carried out by Carleton University Professor Mary Francoli, does note, however, that a number of the government’s other commitments are less ambitious and less directly relevant to the goals of the OGP. This does not mean that they are not worth doing, just that they are less impactful. One issue, therefore, would seem to be whether the government’s plan has struck the right balance between ambitious and significant goals and low hanging fruit.

A further concern is that the broad commitment to open government has been channelled primarily into developments around open data. While open data is important, and while developments in this area have been meaningful, open access and open participation are crucial components of open government and are essential to realizing its objectives. Indeed, one of the recommendations in the review document relates to the need for the government to broaden its focus so as to give more attention to open access and participation.

Through her consultation with stakeholders and other organizations, Francoli identifies a broad range of concerns over how the federal government communicates with citizens, and how it compiles, shares and archives information. The review is particularly critical of the government’s tepid improvements to access to information in Canada, and it suggests that nothing short of legislative reform will deliver necessary improvements. The review also indicates that there have been shortcomings in citizen and stakeholder engagement and participation in the development of the goals and priorities of open government. The review also makes recommendations regarding improved information flows, the need to ensure that data is released in useable formats and with appropriate metadata, and the need to expand integrity commitments. While the review notes that open government has a strong champion at the federal level in the Treasury Board Secretariat President Tony Clement, it also identifies a need for broader support within the government.

A copy of the report and information on how to provide comments and feedback on it are available here.

A terrific collection of papers that I had the pleasure of editing along with Mistrale Goudreau, Courtney Doagoo and Madelaine Saginur, titled Intellectual Property Law for the 21^st Century: Interdisciplinary Approaches, has just been published by Irwin Law. The book is available for sale from Irwin as an eBook or in paperback format. It is also published under a Creative Commons Licence, and individual chapters can be downloaded here.

This book flows from a workshop we hosted at the University of Ottawa. Our goal was to bring together Canadian academics interested in interdisciplinary approaches to IP law. Participants were from many different disciplines, including law, English, cultural studies, music, library and information studies, criminology, political science, and sports management. The papers cover a broad range of IP subject matter, including copyright, trademark and patent law, as well as laws restricting ambush marketing, and personality rights.

The collection of papers pushes us to think about the importance of interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches in a context where intellectual property law is no longer simply a matter of commercial relationships, but also trenches deeply on issues of economics, culture, health, innovation, creativity, and intellectual freedom. Some of the papers use insights from other disciplines to examine how the law should be interpreted and applied (in the context of copyright infringement analysis in music or film, for example), others bring to bear the theories of methodologies of other disciplines to elucidate the historical evolution of certain IP rights, or the political discourse surrounding IP law and its reform. There is truly an immense breadth of content here, from a discussion of evidentiary problems in business method patent litigation to the impact of commercialization approaches to scientific research on academic scientists. Check out the table of contents to get a sense of the full range of topics.