Blog article: We’re making a new Open Data Policy for Toronto!  

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Hi! We’re Toronto’s Open Data team; we’re Denis, Mackenzie, Reham, Reza, Mohammad, Yanan, Luke, Adam and Swati. We help Torontonians use and learn about City data.  

We’re the team behind Toronto’s Open Data Portal; every day, we work with colleagues across the City to help make data available.  

We’re also responsible for the City’s Open Data Policy, the rules and ideas that govern how the City opens its data. If you think of the Open Data Portal as the branches of a tree, then the policy is the roots.  

First introduced in 2011, the policy has enabled the Open Data program to grow and flourish for over a decade. We have nearly 500 datasets on the portal, representing data from 43 of the City’s 44 divisions. And with over 10,000 monthly visitors, we’re one of Canada’s most active municipal data portals. 

But a tree can only grow as big as its roots allow. To continue growing the quality and quantity of data on the portal, and to ensure open data is providing the most value to users – from staff to Councillors, to community advocates and businesses – we need to nourish our roots.  

That’s why we’re updating Toronto’s Open Data Policy! 

Why do we need a new policy? 

The original policy was created when the open data movement was still in its infancy, and as a result, it’s a bit light on specifics. There’s not much detail on roles and responsibilities, or about what “good” looks like when it comes to divisions and their data. 

We’ve learned a lot since the policy was introduced about what makes open data successful and how to foster a culture of openness in organizations. It’s time to codify those learnings into policy.  

Our current processes for publishing open data are working well, but they’re ad hoc. Our team will hear about a dataset and collaborate with the data owners to get it ready for publication, or vice versa.  

That approach has helped us get to nearly 500 published datasets, but there’s a growing backlog of requests. We’d love to open ALL the data, but we need to prioritize our efforts (check out how San Francisco does this). By creating a policy that connects data with user needs, we can focus on publishing the most impactful data. Data that’s in high demand. Data that can enable staff or the public to do innovative things. Or data about the issues that are top of mind for Torontonians. 

Oh, and last, but certainly not least, City Council has asked us to update the policy.  

How are we making the policy? 

Our approach to policy development is informed by some key principles.  

First, we want to work in the open. It’s the open data policy after all, and we want to be as transparent as possible. We’ll share updates about the policy on our public-facing blog, and we’ll post draft iterations and change logs for the policy as we work on it.  

Traditional methods like steering committees and stakeholder groups (which we’re doing too!) rely on assumptions about who is interested in or impacted by a policy. By opening our work up, we create avenues to get feedback from other valuable – if unexpected – places.  

We’re also committed to co–designing the policy with its users: staff on the ground who will put the policy into practice. When policy development is siloed from implementation, we risk creating policies that can’t — or won’t — be adopted. We want our policy to be an enabler for teams working with data, so we’re involving them in the process and asking them to prototype the policy with us.  

Lastly, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. We’ve learned a lot since the Open Data program launched in 2009, but so have our colleagues in cities like Edmonton, Hamilton (which led an innovative public consultation process to develop their open data policy), Montreal, San Francisco (which has outstanding support materials for staff) or New York (where open data isn’t just a policy, it’s the law).  

We’re looking at these cities’ policies and chatting with our contacts about how those policies were rolled out. Just like with open source software, we’re going to take the best parts of their policies and adapt them to Toronto.  

How can you get involved? 

If you’re curious where we’re headed, check out the Sunlight Foundation’s guidelines for open data policies. Sunlight’s core principles are included in our current policy, and we’re inspired by their work. 

Over the coming months, we’ll be doing lots of consultations:  

• We want to learn from staff about how we can make the open data publishing process easier, or how open data can be a lever to create other data products.  

• We want to connect with business intelligence teams at the City to learn more about divisional data assets.  

• We want to connect with those leading other data policies and frameworks at the City, so we can work in parallel.  

• We want to connect with external users – journalists, academics, entrepreneurs, community advocates or civic technologists – to understand what data they’d like to see on the portal (or even what data they may be able to contribute!).  

We’ll post about all these engagements on our blog, so stay tuned for opportunities to contribute. 

In the interim, our inbox is always open! Reach out to opendata@toronto.ca if you have ideas or questions.  

We look forward to co-designing Toronto’s next Open Data Policy with you!