Building An Inventory Of Frequently Asked Questions

The following are some FAQs from past experiences in the open data community and our mentoring engagements. If you have these questions and others, feel free to connect with the mentoring group

Where do I start in Open Data?

The first thing is to secure a commitment from your workplace toward releasing data sets. Fortunately there is no need to reinvent the wheel as many governments and not-for-profits and even private companies have gone through and resolved all of the issues and nuances of releasing their data. That’s good news! We can show you examples and point you in the right direction.

What is the appropriate Open Data licence?

Lots of work has been done with licences in Canada. There is a Federal Government Open Data licence created to cover Provincial and Municipal processes as well as Federal. Not everyone in Canada has adopted this licence however. We can help you understand what is included in the licence and why.

What data should I make open?

As much data as you possibly can! In many cases, data is already being released on your Website - just not on an open data page or portal and in machine readable formats. We will talk about our experiences wrestling with this question and how files like PDFs need to be converted to usable formats for open data..