Hit and Miss #288: Honoured
Hi!
Writing after a fairly hectic week, wrapping some things at work before some time off.
Because of that hectic week, I haven’t had much time to speak to, or reflect on, a really generous honour from Thursday. If you’ll forgive the indulgence, I’m touched to say that, as part of Open Data Week, the Canadian Open Data Society jury voted—uh—me as the 2022 Canadian Open Data Leader of the Year. The jury statement captures their kind reasoning, and we recorded a video where I explained a bit about my main open data project last year. If you were reading along in late November, the project may sound familiar—I previously wrote about the POEC Explorer, a tool to make it easier to access the transcripts of the Public Order Emergency Commission.
I’m particularly touched by this, since it acknowledges a broader definition of open data than we sometimes use, and an activity that I think is really important: not necessarily opening data (these transcripts were already on the web), but making it more available and accessible than it otherwise might be (now, the transcripts are available as both HTML and CSV, facilitating both reading and analysing the transcripts—treating the words as data, while also respecting their form as testimony).
These things are often public, but not published—not as usable as they could be, even though an institution has done a reasonable effort to make it available. And often, that amount is all the institution has the resources (or capacity) to do: pressed for time, at least it’s out there, which is commendable. But that’s where, sometimes, civil society can step in to help—in this case, me. It shouldn’t always need to be this way, but I was happy to be able to in this instance. I mean, who can resist scraping a bunch of PDFs for a weekend?
I’ll have more to say about this tension at another time—but for now, I’ll just say that I’m really honoured to have received this award, and happy to have done my small part to make this information more open. And thank you, too, to those of you who endure my various half-baked “so I’ve been working on a project” schpeels, and to T and A for understanding when I go off on a coding rabbithole for an evening.
All the best for the week ahead!
Lucas