%0 Journal Article %J Open Source Business Resource %D 2008 %T Data Access in Canada: CivicAccess.ca %A Tracey P. Lauriault %A Hugh McGuire %X There is a global movement to liberate government-"owned" data sets, such as census data, environmental data, and data generated by government-funded research projects. This open data movement aims to make these datasets available, at no cost, to citizens, citizen groups, non-governmental-organizations (NGOs) and businesses. The arguments are many: such data spurs economic activity, helps citizens make better decisions, and helps us understand better who we are and where we are going as a country. Further, these data were collected using tax dollars, yet the government holds a monopoly which makes data available only to those able to pay the high access fees, while some data is not made available at all. The open data movement is lagging in Canada as demonstrated by exorbitant fees for such basics as the data set of postal codes correlated to electoral districts. This data could be used for any number of civic engagement projects, but it costs thousands of dollars due to Statistics Canada's policies of cost recovery. This article aims to bring these issues to a wider public. The long-term vision is a country in which citizens, specialists, professionals, academics, community groups and even businesses can work together, developing innovative information access and visualization tools, better decision-making models, and more tools responsive to the needs of the citizens. Liberating data will spur grassroots research on important social, economic, political and technical areas, currently hampered by lack of access to and high cost of civic data. Further, we want to link the debate about data to questions of government transparency and accountability, which pivot on access to accurate, reliable, and timely data. %B Open Source Business Resource %I Talent First Network %C Ottawa %8 02/2008 %G eng %U http://timreview.ca/article/120 %N February 2008 %9 Articles %1 datalibre.ca Tracey P. Lauriault is a geographer. She is a member of the Senior Advisory Committee for an On-line Health Data and Community Mapping Portal, the Geographic and Numerical Information System (GANIS), and a research associate with Acacia Consulting and Research. Her research includes access and preservation to scientific data, olfactory cartography, transdisciplinary research, community mapping, homelessness, the application of geomatics technologies, cybercartography and infrastructures. She co-edits datalibre.ca, a blog about public access to government data in Canada. %2 datalibre.ca Hugh McGuire is a Montreal-based writer, web developer and free data activist. He is the founder of LibriVox.org, a volunteer Internet project with the objective of making free audio versions of all books in the public domain, now the most prolific audio book maker in the world. He co-edits datalibre.ca, a blog about public access to government data in Canada.