[Open-data-census] government nuances and standard options

Fri Oct 4 21:39:26 BST 2013

Richard;

I have been negotiating wtih the oknf folks on all of this stuff.  The data
that went out for the last census was not the best and I was not happy at
the ranking precisely for the reasons you stated.

There is some effort being made, and there is an echoing of these issues by
some other jurisdictions, however, I think there is a UK centric bias in
terms of assumptions on centralized gov.  There is a municipal census as
well, my issue for us is the importance of the provinces.  Even for the
statistical question there are issues, because, according to the wording,
if statcan for instance released one table in all the good open data ways,
then that would yield a yes, but then there are all of these other
datasets, so the question should probably be related to a census and not
statistical, as that means in our case nrcan, nrc, and so on.

I will be doing my editorial work on this this weekend.  Lets see how it
goes.

Keep brining this stuff up, as I feel a little lonely on this topic.

Cheers
t

On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 9:15 PM, James McKinney <james at opennorth.ca> wrote:

> I agree, Richard. I think the solution is either (A) to allow the country
> editors/reviewers to mark this category as "not applicable" (although VIA
> Rail exists, it's not sufficiently relevant) or (B) to allow country
> editors/reviewers to change the weights assigned to each category. In this
> case, a very low weight would be assigned to Transport Timetables to avoid
> it having an overly large impact on Canada's global score.
>
> Each province, territory and municipality would have different answers to
> each question, so it's not possible to produce an aggregate answer for
> "Transport Timetables". If the Census is interested in that granularity, we
> need to add those jurisdictions as distinct from Canada's entry in the
> Census.
>
> James
>
> On 2013-10-04, at 3:57 PM, Richard Akerman wrote:
>
> > I have to say when I first saw the census I assumed "Transport
> > Timetables" for Canada meant at any level of government.
> >
> > By designing the survey to measure national-level, with the language
> > "Timetables of major government operated (or commissioned)
> > *national-level* public transport services (specifically bus and
> > train)." the census is rewarding countries with a strong
> > centrally-directed national transportation infrastructure.  There
> > doesn't seem to be a "not applicable to government structure" option.
> > The messaging around what the Census is measuring needs to be really
> > clear.
> >
> > It's great that the Census now has editing and review options, but I'm
> > not sure what would apply to Canada.
> > I could argue exist yes, digital yes, public yes, free unknown, online
> > yes, machine-readable no, bulk yes?, open unknown, up-to-date yes.
> > http://www.viarail.ca/en/plan-your-trip/customize-your-train-schedule
> >
> > But in Canada the national train service is an independent crown
> > corporation.  Is that "government operated"?  The distances are large
> > and the trains are slow, so most people fly.  From Halifax to Montreal
> > there's not a train every five minutes, or every hour.  There's one
> > train once a day three days a week.
> >
> http://www.viarail.ca/sites/all/files/media/pdfs/schedules/Summer2013/VL24458_4970-13_Timetable2013_ETE_30-31.pdf
> >
> > On the other hand, Canadian municipal transit systems are well-used
> > and many have open data, as in e.g. City of Ottawa
> > http://www.octranspo1.com/developers
> >
> > My concern is that if the Census is presented as a national-level
> > summary for comparison and policy-making, it's going to look like
> > Canada lags at Transport Timetables, when it's actually just because
> > the most-used transportation modes where most of the open data is
> > available are at a different level of government than the national
> > government, or are of a different type (airlines).
> >
> > --
> > Richard Akerman
> > scilib at gmail.com
> > http://scilib.typepad.com/
> >
> > Twitter: @scilib
>
>

-- 
Tracey P. Lauriault
http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
http://datalibre.ca/
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