Insights from the www.openbydefault.ca database project

Abstract

Despite Canada’s history of public records access legislation and its commitment to open government policies that seek to advance the disclosure of government records, significant quantities of Canadian federal government information remain not only inaccessible but vulnerable to destruction. This article describes the www.openbydefault.ca project, which aims to preserve and publicly disclose federal government records released through formal Access to Information Act requests by making them immediately available online. From concept to implementation, Open by Default underwent many developments in its life cycle. This article examines the evolution of this project, including as it pertains to data acquisition and processing, database and website design and development, and document storage and hosting, as well as project sustainability and evolution. Using primarily a project development methodology that outlines the evolution of the project during the period from conceptualization to launch, this article discusses and analyzes how the research for the project was carried out and provides a framework to allow researchers to understand how the work might be replicated in future efforts to make government information more accessible.