Open data proving harder to mine

Exchange misses target for luring investments

WATERLOO, ONT. • Three years ago, then-Treasury Board president Tony Clement announced there was a new gold rush underway in Canada.

The gold — or “new natural resource” — to be mined wasn’t a precious metal, oil reserve or forest. It was government data. Before the digital age, the government’s collection of records about everything from traffic patterns to the weather was stored in banker’s boxes and filing cabinets, inaccessible to the public without an access to information request.

Thanks to spreadsheets and the Internet, it can now be hosted online for anyone to analyze or build a business on. In 2013, consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimated the global economic value of open data at US$3 trillion.

To help link companies with government stewards of this precious resource, Clement announced the creation of a public-private partnership, the Canadian Open Data Exchange. Based in Waterloo, Ont., ODX launched in the spring of 2015 with $6 million in funding. Its goal was to incubate 15 new companies, create 370 direct and indirect jobs and attract $50 million in venture capital over its three-year mandate.

“ODX will support collaboration among the private sector, academia, and government to encourage the commercialization of open data, with the end goal of becoming self-sustaining,” Clement said. “It will also support a pan-Canadian open data innovation community that will help incubate the next generation of data-driven companies.”

Two years into that threeyear mandate, ODX is on track to reach its goals for creating jobs and companies, but has fallen short of its target for attracting investments for open data companies. Its future — and the long-term fate of government open data initiatives — is uncertain.

ODX managing director Kevin Tuer said the organization has spent more time than he expected raising awareness about the potential of open data among both companies and governments. To convince governments to open up more data, ODX needs success stories and tangible evidence of economic value being created by the initiative — but to get those stories, it needs to convince governments to open up more data.

“The intent, at our launch, was that we would be spending the majority of our time helping companies access and use open data, believing the supply side was in good shape.