... By Tyson Macaulay
Internet Applications Consultant
Industry Canada
......
Canada was at the conclusion of a national election in October of 1993, and the media was a constant source of metaphors and similes about the results. But there was a difference this time around because in the five years proceeding the last election, virtual reality and computer graphics had become media tools for the digital metaphor. One of the metaphors used in the election was a three-dimensional computer graphic that took the viewer on a bird-like flight through the interior of the Canadian House of Commons, and broke the seats in the House down into different colours depending on which party now controlled the seats. As the commentator "Selected" a seat, information about the seat was returned. Sound like a familiar concept? This is what inspired Andrew to think up the initial premise for the Open Government Pilot which became a reality on May 20, 1994.
Open Government Pilot, or Opengov as we call it for short, is an attempt to create a central clearinghouse for Canadian government information on the Internet - using World Wide Web technology as the primary delivery mechanism. In October of 1993 we had been in the Internet document-delivery business for about two and a half months, but had not yet done any experimenting with concepts like WWW. So all we had at this point was a vague idea for Opengov. In November of 1993 we built our first WWW interfaces for our document-delivery program - and the potential to make Opengov a reality became apparent as soon as the first page of HTML was written. WWW seemed at the time, and has proven to be, the ideal delivery mechanism for Opengov because it is ideal for addressing the primary objective of Opengov: creating a user-friendly, central point for government information that would provide accessibility, draw more users onto the networks, and encourage the use of more sophisticated tools for information retrieval.
WWW was ideal for Opengov since it did not require any knowledge of internet addressing, or menuing systems, or protocols or command-line interfaces - everything can be explained to the neophyte as they go along. This was and is of primary concern to CDD since we did not want to create a resource available only to the elite net-surfer. Bearing this in mind, we also created a full menuing structure for gopher-users and included gopher-links to public WWW brousers (Lynx) complete with instructions for directing the public brousers to Opengov. through this means we managed to make the WWW resources available even to people using Freenets as access-points.
By satisfying our primary objectives, we also met two other crucial objectives to CDD: awareness raising and influencing decision-makers. Opengov has had the fortunate effect of dramatically increasing the awareness of potential Internet applications in government, and has definitely influenced other departments to get their own Internet programs underway.
That is what we like to think has been accomplished by Opengov. The "how" is to follow. Lets start by describing the players in Opengov and how the first objective was met.
No. First, none of the Parliamentary institutions we were approaching had any clear idea of what the Internet is. Second, none of them could get access to the internet other than through regular dial-up connectivity (this is still the case). Third, none of them had any immediate intentions of making their public information available electronically - which means they didn't have any electronic material to give us for distribution on the Internet. And fourth, after numerous meetings, most of them still had only a vague idea of what they were getting into.
The House of Commons is the elected portion of the Canadian Parliament with 295 members, and lots of power - basically all of it. Within the House are various agencies, political and non- political, responsible for some form of public information or communication. We were lucky in that when we approached the Public Information Office in December of 1993, they had already been initiated into the concept of electronic information in part by the presence of the National Capital Freenet in Ottawa (which was started in February of 1993) - Canada's first Freenet. Good. They had also been introduced to the Internet by the main-stream media. Not good. While the Freenet had revealed the public- access nature of the Internet, the media had created the perception of a community of hackers sharing hardcore graphics files and building bombs in their spare time.
The104 men and women. The Senate is intended as the source of "sober second thought" in Canadian government and has the power to delay (perhaps fatally), but not kill legislation. Much like the House, the Senate had its own phalanx of communications people, but being a smaller institution, was more centralized in administration and communications issues. They too knew little or nothing about the Internet, but, like the House, expressed interest from the outset.
The Supreme Court of Canada is the last court of appeal and highest court in the land. It is composed of nine judges appointed by the. Over the years the Supreme Court of Canada has had a very significant effect on the Constitution through its interpretations of the separation of powers between the federal government and the provinces, and since 1982, on civil rights issues. Unlike the House and the Senate, the Court was already venturing out onto the Internet through a cooperative venture with the law school at the University de Montréal. For about eight months prior to our arrival on the scene, U of Montreal had been taking the Court's decisions and archiving them in a Gopher database. So the Court was immediately responsive when we approached them to actually get information about the court and the people who make the decisions (the Justices) up on the Internet. Our job was made easier by the fact the decisions were already being placed on the net - saving us the big task of trying to do this.
In addition to the Parliamentary bodies, we also built in links to all the existing Canadian federal databases on the Internet. At the time of Opengov's launch on May 20, 1994, there were about seven federal departments with information on the Internet. Remember that number for later.
After we had covered the gamut of federal information, we started to think about the. In Canada the provinces play a very significant role in the lives of the citizens because the division of powers in the Canadian Constitution gives the provinces powers over issues like health, the environment, education, infrastructure, intra-province trade, and law- enforcement. Naturally they would have plenty of information valuable to Canadians. Unfortunately, aside from a couple of notable excepts, they provinces don't have very robust Internet- information programs. Nevertheless, the information that existed was necessarily included and Provinces without a program were marked as "Under development".
There is a very large body of government documents that we felt would be of interest to many of the users of Opengov - but we didn't have the manpower to make them available: ie, the Constitution, the Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, GATT and various other tomes. Rather than try and duplicate the efforts of other people, we elected to simply provide links to sites on the Internet that already had these resources available.
The final element of Opengov was a page that presented all the known links to other national government sites on the Internet. Today there are about five others in addition to Canada. The US by far the largest, followed by Australia, Israel, Singapore and France. (The criteria was that the actual "government" had to be making the sites available - not just someone making government information available).
Generally the process of bringing the "content providers" on-side was consistent; and once we had one convinced, the others came a little easier. The Supreme Court was the starting point because they were the most initiated from their experiences with the University de Montréal. A demo of the working Industry Canada WWW site in January of 1994 was enough to get a small supply of their information to put together a full "demo" of their material.
This "demo" strategy was the backbone of the Opengov campaign. The demo would consist of a copy of Mosaic and a copy of the Trumpet TCP stack (un-configured), HTML pages and graphics files. The "demo" or Road-show as we called it, would simply run as a stand-alone WWW example with all files being loaded from the local drive - no server involved, no connectivity to the Internet required. The whole thing fit onto a floppy disk and was passed around the Supreme Court - giving lots of people the opportunity to see it at their leisure. The information contained in the demo was all scanned from pre-existing, glossy publicity pamphlets that we were given at the first meeting. Using this strategy it was not long before was had the Court's permission to go public.
Convincing the House of Commons and the Senate followed a similar strategy, though expanded. With these institutions we were dealing with a much larger bureaucracy and dramatically heightened "sensitivities". We were also dealing with a complete lack of Internet experience and considerable media- induced suspicion. The answer was to combine lots of visible examples with a "Low-ball" approach; down-play the project. In the end this meant emphasizing that we wanted nothing more than information that is already 100% public, and freely distributed through other mediums. We just wanted to make the same old information available in a new way. Nothing added or changed.
Another important element of Opengov is that it is called, deliberately, a "pilot". The idea being that we are not instituting anything that is operational. There is still room for everyone's input; things can be changed/corrected at any time; it is not intended as a "complete" service, etc. Thus we were allowed by the powers that be to roll out Opengov without asking for input from the deputy sub-assistant in charge of battle-ribbons in the Veterans Affairs Ministry, or many other people for that matter. What is more, it is likely that this project will never be "operational" in the sense that many people understand "operational". This idea will be rapped up in the Future of Open Government Pilot.
Public awareness
The significance of the public awareness of Opengov is not that the resources merely exist, but that they exist as a system that is user friendly. Applying WWW to government information has done a lot to start creating a sense that the public can access government information without having to navigate intimidating computer interfaces.
Opengov provides vital carrot to draw Canadians on-line. One of the most frequently asked questions we have fielded from the public since the launch of Opengov is: "How do I get connected?". Not only are Canadians being encouraged to get on- line by the resources available through Opengov, but these projects encourage the use of the most sophisticated interfaces.
Governmental awareness
Opengov has tremendously increased the profile of the Internet within the Canadian government. The public nature of the Pilot, coupled with the fact that it is an implicitly sanctioned element of the government's political agenda, has brought it to the attention of decision-makers in the highest echelons of the bureaucracy.
When Opengov was launched, there were seven other federal departments with information on the Internet and therefore linked into the project. In the space of four months that number has doubled and it is common to find two or even three Internet projects within a single department. It would be outrageous to suggest that Opengov was responsible for all this activity, but it is fair to say that many seeds were planted.
The fact that departments sometimes have multiple Internet projects is positive - rather than a disorganized and inefficient situation. Ideally, each individual information provider within the federal government will eventually make their own information available - maybe sharing server-space, maybe having their own servers and domain names. This is the best policy since there is a very large number of information providers within government, each dealing with a specific client group or section of the Canadian public. These services will have to be flexible and are best designed to react to client/public demands quickly. Small distributed systems accomplish this task. Large centralized systems would mistakenly attempt to mimic the centralized efficiency of paper-based systems. This is a fact that Opengov is beginning to make people aware of.
One of the characteristics among the federal databases linked under Opengov is that in all cases initiative has been taken at the lowest, group levels. For instance, the first agency on the Internet for the Department of Fisheries was a small regional office in the Maritimes. Yet they are also the most suited to deliver their particular information. So the do. This situation is the rule rather than the exception so far - small groups taking independent initiative across Canadian government. Unfortunately, as extraordinary as many of these projects are, they do not get the attention of the big decision makers across government. Opengov has managed to attain enough recognition to get the attention of the decision-makers. Which takes us to objective three.
The resources for Opengov were and are begged, borrowed and stolen (not really stolen). The hardware used is a borrowed research machine (Sparc1) from the Communications Research Centre (CRC) outside Ottawa, The project was launched using an existing 56K line to the Ontario Network (Onet). It required the some time from a Manager (Andrew Stephens) and a part-time consultant (me, Tyson Macaulay) to acquire, design, build and administer the system. Everything came from existing office budgets without a fund for "Internet" services per se ever being set aside by management; fortunately,what we did get from management was a blind eye and alot of forbearance. At one point our "group" was known as the "Skunk Works". It was not that upper management didn't know what we doing, they did, they just figured somewhere down the road it would be worth the small resources being used.
The crucial test was whether or not people would use the service. Our current estimate on usage is 4500 hits a day on the Internet resources developed by CDD - of which Opengov is a major factor. We know this is not large by some standards, but considering some of the challenges the Internet faces in Canada, we think it is pretty good. Good enough to consume half the bandwidth on some parts of the national network anyway.
All hardware problems in Canada generally come down to "bandwidth" problems. The cost of the machine to serve the information to the net community is only a small part of the network business in Canada due to the tariffs placed on data lines here. When we started providing information on the Internet our entire department (6000 people) AND the country's premier communications research agency (the CRC) were sharing a 56K dedicated link to the internet. And it was full. So we buy more, right? Consider this: T1 (1.5mbps) costs between $14,000 to $22,000 a month in Canada. Full 56K alone goes for about $2000.00 a month. That is alot for projects that don't have real budgets. Projects that use "existing" resources.
One of the stark realities of Opengov was that between the anticipated usage and the number of graphics, bandwidth demands would be high. Far too high for our site. We didn't want to create a resource that no one could access because the site was too busy. So in mid February we made a single posting to comp.infosystems.www asking if any sites around the Internet would be interested in acting as "mirrors" to an experimental new service to get Canadian government information out on the Internet. Within two weeks we had seven volunteers sites ready to donate server space and bandwidth. Each had their own combination of reasons for participating: the one common reason was the desire to help get the information out to the public in the most efficient manner. Some of the other reasons were; a desire to gain expertise in WWW by practicing with a pre- fabricated HTML architecture installed on their system; a need to demonstrate to local decision-makers that the technology had useful applications; a desire to make the resources locally available (ie, to students); curiosity, and my favourite; an attempt to influence local agencies or governments into undertaking a similar project by holding Opengov up as a demonstration.
On the launch date of May 20, we had mirrors sites up and running in (from east to west): The University of New Brunswick, University de Montréal, Natural Resources Canada in Ottawa, the Centre for Inland-Waterways(Environment Canada) - Burlington Ontario, The University of Calgary - Alberta, The University of British Columbia and also a site in Helsinki, Finland. Since that time we have added two more sites, the University of Lausanne - Switzerland, and the Department of Canadian Heritage - Ottawa.
The biggest challenge faced in the development of Opengov was, in the end, getting approval to announce - this falls squarely within the "political" category of problems. Because of the information we were playing with, the project potentially effected ALOT of people. Many of them powerful. Opengov generated many difficult questions from people within the Parliamentary echelons: "What if we get 5000 email messages a day like Clinton?", "Could hackers attack the parliamentary information?", and the toughest one "So, how do we access this information". The last question was the toughest because the most powerful body on Parliament Hill (The House of Commons) has the most un-robust communications network as far as acquiring the Internet is concerned - "so we cant even use this system....?". It was not unlike asking them to move forward while blind. As of March 4, 1994 Opengov was ready to be made public. It would be six weeks before we were cleared to do so.
We talked to the political-handlers about launching - they didn't really understand the technology or how the Internet worked - so they were "uncomfortable" with an announcement from the Minister. We talked to the people who do the press-releases for our department - they understood a little better but insisted the Minister to make the announcement for the cachet. Deadlock. At one point Andrew was telling me to be prepared to write the whole thing off - too hot to handle. Frankenstein - but still asleep.
The answer to the problem of getting Opengov out the door was to take a "low-ball" approach. Strip the idea and concepts of Opengov down to the chassis and re-present. What were we trying to do? Make information about the Parliament and government available to the public. Is this information special or different? No, it is all free, public information also available in print (somewhere). Will the information be changed? No. The content remains the same. What was so special about this that made people weary? We don't know. In the end we managed to have the communications people get a very plain news-release (one of hundreds each year) vetted by the Minister's office. The releases came out May 20, 1994 and we were official.
Opengov was designed to act as a clearinghouse for government information by acting as a comprehensive index for government information and providing some crucial information that otherwise would not have been available for the near future. Anyone who knows WWW and the hypertext mark-up language (HTML) understands that the WWW "pages" containing this information can be made with about 10,000 times less space than Opengov uses now. Once all the institutions are on-line Opengov will simply be a central index of HTML files maybe 10K or 50K in size. What will be significant is that Opengov will be installed locally on every server in the country, and stored on every PC and Mac as a local reference file. Opengov or its successor will be a standard, ubiquitous tool for anyone seeking to extract Canadian Government information from the future Internet.
Open Government URL -