Assessement for Canada

Open Data Index Global Open Data Index 2016
1

Greetings;
I was asked by mor.rubinstein@okfn.org to assess both Canada and Ireland. I did so during a very busy time during the school term. I was also the main editor for the previous 2 years and one of the new indicators such as land registry was included based on my input. I dutifully filled out the 2016 index. Also, every year in my 4th year Critical Data Studies Class the students are asked to assess a dataset according to the OKF Criteria. They must learn the methodology, and download the spreadsheets and submit an assessment. This is now the 3rd year, and approximate 75 students have submitted assessments. All this to say that I am very familiar with the GODI, have contributed extensively and have been a long standing editor.

Because I am marking and thus verifying the work the students have submitted and I am examining the results in the index. By doing so I have discovered many errors in the Canadian Submission and note that all of my original submissions have disappeared, that I am not acknowledge, and submissions seem to be annonymous. This begs the question as to what has happened to my submissions and why were they changed without me receiving any notification? I go through great pains to ensure and accurate, fair, robust and reliable assessment. It takes me many hours of volunteer and expert time to do so, and I consult when I have uncertainties and also communicate with public officials to validate results.

I very much want to continue to support this process but I am beginning to question quality and process. Can you please help me understand what has happened to the submissions that I made? and so on? The assessment is in fact faulty in some occasions and these should be corrected.

Sincerely
Tracey

2

Dear Tracey, thank you for writing. We acknowledge the great work you’ve done during these years in GODI.
Regarding last year’s process, we would like to explain why the changes happened that way. When we started the review process and after, we made a methodological decision to restart the submissions whenever we made any changes to the review. Also, we selected specific datasets that met our criteria which can deviate from the datasets you evaluated in your original submission. This is a methodological nuance we did not communicate well enough during our submission phase, but we trained our reviewers to look out for reference datasets that qualify for assessment. Looking back, it definitely changed some of the content, especially the availability of the submitters’ names. We are aware that your contributions are only recognized for Draft Legislation and Land Ownership now. We hear your dissatisfaction with how this turned out. Please point us in the direction of the errors, so we can look into them. We have the previous submissions stored in the database, so we would like to find a way to make it work better and have the correct information for Canada.

We are also sure that the process with your students is really interesting, if you ever are interested in hosting a Census for this exercise, please let us know.