I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Richard Pietro as part of his Stories from the Open Gov podcast. Richard has gotten some amazing speakers on his show including Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Ashley Casovan, Nathaniel Heller, Melanie Robert, Rob Davidson, Tony Clement, Michael Geist, Lindsey Marchessault, Ryan Androsoff, Tracey Lauriault, Keith Loo, and Jesse Hirsh. You should subscribe to the podcast and listen to it on SoundCloud. We talk about a range of things here from accessibility to open government and open source, I hope you find it interesting.
I was encouraged by Ioanna Talasli & Nicolas Steenhout to promote podcasts which are accessible and have transcripts. This is difficult for many podcasts, but I wanted to start ensuring that at least the podcasts I am interviewed with have transcripts. For this one I used Rev.com to transcribe the audio which Richard provided from the discussion. It was really quite accurate and also a useful tool as a speaker to actually see what you say. I have to admit to editing the text below to remove some of my filler words and phrases. I do hope that with this awareness I'll become a better speaker over time.
With that said, I hope you enjoy the content.
Richard Pietro:
Hello and welcome to stories from the Open Gov, a podcast dedicated to telling the stories about what open government and open data look like. My name is Richard Pietro and I am joined by Mike Gifford. He is the owner of Ottawa based OpenConcept Consulting, it's a company that specializes in web development with a particular focus on open source and web accessibility. OpenConcept has also contributed to the Drupal Core. Now for some of us that's a whole heck of a lot of tech jargon, which is why Mike is here. Not only will we glance over some of these tech matters, but we will also talk about how open source technology can help governments. Hello Mike, and thanks for joining us.
Mike Gifford:
Richard, good to talk.
Richard Pietro:
So my first question is quite simply, do you mind clearing up your introduction a little for us? Like, what is Drupal?
Mike Gifford:
So Drupal is a content management system, and so what that means is it's a framework that allows people to go from entering content into a database, and allow it to be expressed in a website or for that matter it can be put up in a whole bunch of other ways. It can be used as a framework to organize and display content orally through Alexa or for... through your mobile app, through a smart smartphone in terms of trying to go up and have responsive and native mobile apps. It's a framework.... It's a content organization framework and it's also very flexible and allows you to go off and do a lot with it. More people are aware of WordPress as a tool and WordPress is great but it's more sort of geared towards blogging and for simpler websites, where this is about trying to build something that is more customized, more comprehensive things like bilingualism and whatnot are things that are harder to do with a simple blogging tool, and Drupal allows you to create multilingual sites.
It's also really useful to build sites that are accessible which is why I've been involved, and I've contributed to Core and a whole bunch of modules in Drupal, but I'm also a Drupal core maintainer. So I have an official capacity and in every copy of Drupal 8 that's downloaded my name is listed there amongst a whole bunch of other people who've contributed tons and tons of their time to make sure that this open source software (which is free for everyone to use and drives 3% of the web) is able to be as good and robust as possible.
Richard Pietro:
Now, am I wrong in thinking that whitehouse.gov a number of years ago under the Obama administration, they used Drupal to build whitehouse.gov?
Mike Gifford:
That is absolutely correct, and they used it for... Well, up until I think that the first... the end of the first year of Trump's presidency, and I think they just realized that for a president that... yeah, thought in tweets it wasn't really relevant to have something as powerful and is able to organize as much content as what Drupal does.
Richard Pietro:
This is quite possibly the most political this podcast has been, this little exchange here between Trump and Obama but okay, so let's get back on track a little bit here. One other thing I want to ask you is, there are tons of tech languages and programming languages out there, and for people like me who are not programmers it can be very confusing.
Mike Gifford:
Yes.
Richard Pietro:
So I want to understand the relationships between these languages a little bit better. So if we were to think of as an analogy thinking of a car, right? With something like JavaScript and Python and PHP, is it kind of like the engine of the car?
Mike Gifford:
PHP would be the engine, JavaScript would be things like the automatic window-
Richard Pietro:
Or be like the features of the car?
Mike Gifford:
The features of the car, the windshield wipers and whatnot.
Richard Pietro:
Okay.
Mike Gifford:
It's the stuff that is dealing with the exterior look and feel, the stuff that you see but you never see PHP. I mean that's all under the hood and so you see the effects of JavaScript because JavaScript organizes, and arranges the HTML and CSS to display information to the browser. So the JavaScript sort of is the functional moving parts and the CSS is like the paint job of the car, and the images those are the decals you throw in the car.
Richard Pietro:
Where does Drupal sort of fit in that conversation? Or in that analogy, I'm sorry.
Mike Gifford:
So Drupal in that case is... it's the whole car because it includes everything and whether you want to build a car or an aircraft carrier or a moon lander, I mean you can do that all you need to have the... there's an engine that allows you to power your websites and organize the content that you don't actually see that, and there's a database as well, the database is sort of like the gas for the car.
Richard Pietro:
That would be things like SQL or MySQL or things of that nature, right?
Mike Gifford:
Yeah, that's right. But yeah Drupal is the whole package and so it's hard when you're comparing something like Ruby or Python to Drupal, because those are essentially the engine.
Richard Pietro:
Okay.
Mike Gifford:
So it's like you can't really compare Ruby with Drupal because it's like comparing a V8 to an electric engine. They're both engines and they both do the same thing and if you don't bother to look up the hood... if you're not trying to build a car it doesn't really matter, but if you are trying to build the car it does matter and if you want to be able to have a car that has certain things built into that, like if you want to make sure that you've got comfortable bucket seats as opposed to-
Richard Pietro:
Bench seats?
Mike Gifford:
Yeah, bench seats or milk cartons stuck on the ground you're going to want to have a framework that actually has a lot of material and development that's going into it to improve its usability.
Richard Pietro:
Which is I'm assuming probably why... and for a lot of people like me they don't understand that just because you can code doesn't mean you can build a car. There're some specialists that focus on the engines and the pistons and things of that nature, and then you have your brake guy and then you have people that do the paint job.
Mike Gifford:
Yeah.
Richard Pietro:
People that do the electrical, so that much within your community while there's... you can dabble in a lot of different things it doesn't mean you can do everything.
Mike Gifford:
It's really interesting and going back to the car analogy, the only car I've ever owned is a 1967 Beetle. I went off and ripped it apart and... actually ripped two of them apart, put them back together into one and drove it across the country, and you could do that with a car that old with very little information, with material online you could... you didn't need to take it into the shop. But if you were to go off and buy let's say the latest... the last issue of Volkswagen that rolled off the press or latest Beetle. You couldn't do that, there's so many electrical components that are built into that, there's so many special tools that are required. It's been so fine tuned over the years that it's not possible for somebody with no training and education to put together a working, viable vehicle because we've made them more complicated.
Mike Gifford:
The same thing applies to the web and that's 20 years ago when I started my company, one person could probably do everything like it wasn't that complicated things had not advanced that far, but now there are so many specialties and there's so many different requirements and so many different use cases, that it's not possible to find somebody who's an expert in everything.
Even if you find a jack of all trades, it's so much more complicated than that, there are people who are full stack developers but they still just know the tools they know and the patterns that they've run into and they know what's worked in the past and can probably learn to replicate it and expand on that, but it's not like it was. You need to have more people involved in building and developing these tools because we expect so much more out of them.
Richard Pietro:
Ain't that the truth? And now that we have this sort of foundation for our conversation I'd like to get into the meaty part of it. For a good long time now many governments have lingered when it came to changing the way they work in the 21st century and the tools that they use. For example, even though it's been on the books for a number of years, Canada has an edict that says it must consider and use open source tools as often or as frequently as possible or the edict is something along those lines, but there hasn't been I think the kind of buy in even though the edict is present or the directive is present. Do you think that that government is giving enough consideration to open source solutions? If not why do you think that is?
Mike Gifford:
No, I don't think that the government is giving enough consideration for open source. Initially it's difficult to try and think about this in terms of the long term and how legacy institutions tend to work, but they're not really keen to innovate and so much of the time it's about trying to minimize risk. For the longest time the least risky thing to do was to buy a service from a third party and then be able to incorporate that afterwards, so that you could just externalize the risk so that a third party is responsible for all of that.
I think that there's been a real effort... well, under the Harper government there was an effort to try and outsource all of the IT functionalities as much as possible, and to... whether it's Canada.ca and web renewal or whether it's The Phoenix Project, there was the belief that IBM or Microsoft or somebody else knew how to do it better and that government could just set up a contract through a long process and pay somebody else to take care of it. I hope that belief is coming to an end that there's a reawakening of the need to invest in people inside the government to understand technology, and to use technology and to be able to not just be consumers of technology but to actually be producers of technology.
There is no other entity in Canada that hires more computer scientists than the Government of Canada, and yet they don't spend a lot of that time finding ways to build and to contribute back to projects that they use. I think that a lot of this comes down to building confidence in their team, and building... and shaping the culture so that people are actually not just consuming open source tools, because there are actually open source tools that are used throughout government, but actually getting governments to start to contribute back to them and to find ways to demonstrate by engaging with the community outside of the government silo, to actually learn how to verify and to build a better product that works well for everyone.
Richard Pietro:
I think one of the examples of what you're referring to that relates particularly to open government and open data, is the Open Data Portals themselves. So for those of you who are not familiar there are really two big dogs in the community, which is you have the traditional sort of over the shelf software known as Socrata, and then you had the open source software known as CKAN. With Socrata government can easily go to them and say, "we want to buy a license, we want you to implement it and you put it out there and we won't worry about a thing." But with CKAN you need to hire people that are familiar with some of those programming languages that we talked about earlier, so they can more appropriately customize a portal that fits their needs and their citizens.
Mike Gifford:
Yeah, I mean that's a great example and CKAN is a wonderful tool. There's actually a variation of it called DKAN which is a Drupal content organizer and manager as well, so that's maintained by-
Richard Pietro:
How's it different? I've never actually heard of DKAN before.
Mike Gifford:
It's just based on Drupal, so a lot of that infrastructure like CKAN is built on... I think it's a Python application if I'm not mistaken, and DKAN is just built on Drupal and PHP. So it's similar in terms of organizing content and it works very similarly, but it's just a Drupal based initiative.
Richard Pietro:
Would it be easier for government agencies to use the DKAN than it would be CKAN? Is it kind of like you're asking someone to just go out and buy a car and do some minor modifications, but with CKAN you're asking someone to build the car from scratch?
Mike Gifford:
I think that with CKAN it's just that it's... I think that there may be some government departments that will be more appropriate to use DKAN because they're already using a Drupal natively, and see CKAN uses Drupal as well but it's... at least the StatsCan implementation does. But it's... I think that having... it's just a matter of providing options that make it easier for people and a lot of times the organizing and managing that content, it's not that difficult as a way of structuring and organizing content itself.
Richard Pietro:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Mike Gifford:
For many organizations CKAN is the right solution and DKAN just provide another option that is a little bit lighter, and a little bit easier for people to implement if you're looking to have a data store. But that provides an option that's more... probably more in line with what their current web teams are already familiar with.
Richard Pietro:
So you are a hardcore open source, web accessibility, Open Data practitioner and advocate?
Mike Gifford:
Yes.
Richard Pietro:
I have to ask you this question, what are some of your biggest beefs on how the government views open source?
Mike Gifford:
So, I think that the biggest problem is that governments see open source as free, and so the big advantage that they see of open source is that you don't have to pay for the license. But that sort of mindset is sort of like free as in beer and not the intention that many people have had in the open source or free software movement as in free isn't speech as a right and whatnot. I tend to think about open source as in... free as in kittens.
Richard Pietro:
Okay. Sorry, I didn't mean to take you out of your zone here but that was just do funny, please continue.
Mike Gifford:
It's totally good. So kittens are lovely and we all like them but then they rip things up and you need to train them, and you have to nurture them if they're going to grow up and be a lovely mature adult cat. If you don't train that and invest time in working with the kitten, then you're going to have a very unpleasant life as a cat owner. So it's that same idea that you need to invest back in the community and that could be a matter of paying for things like there's paying for... paying open source development firms who have experienced working the software, and trying to maintain those organizations who are leading the software initiatives that you're using. I mean that's a great way to do that, even going off and organizing hackathons and providing sponsorships for events that are related.
There's Drupal Camp Ottawa, and there are Drupal camps all over the place but events like that are things that can be... that are always looking for sponsorship whether they're in person or virtual, there's always expenses that need to happen. There's also just trying to go often to educate and talk about it. I mean Drupal is used extensively in governments around the world but you almost never hear about it. The Prime Minister's website uses it, we built the Governor General's website with it, StatsCan can use it which is still one of the largest websites that's the government of Canada has as does buy and sell, as does Ontario.ca, as does Ottawa.ca, as do most governments in the European Union use Drupal still, it's very, very popular in governments in the United States. Australia has put forward an initiative to use Drupal and built their own theme and distribution around that, to make sure that they have a consistent look and feel that is possible for governments not just at a federal level, but also at the state and municipal level.
Mike Gifford:
So there's a lot of stuff that could be done but in general governments are not talking about it, and they're not talking about what all of the work that they're getting for free by choosing open source, and finding ways to help their communities grow and flourish and to get more adoption of these software communities. So it's ridiculous that there are so many governments out there that are using the same tools and yet they don't collaborate with each other on this. They don't collaborate with the community, they're still sort of stuck in their silos for the most part and they're not looking at ways to really benefit from the community aspect of a community driven software initiative like Drupal is.
Richard Pietro:
This is actually very relevant Mike I think, on how the government reacted after the COVID-19 lock downs were announced. So for example, all of a sudden you have all these public servants that are just overloading the government VPNs. I'm not sure if this is still a problem or not but are there sort of solutions that could have helped the government resolve this problem aside from just buying more servers?
Mike Gifford:
So I'm sure that it is a problem but I'm not sure for which departments and I don't know that even the government itself is aware of how much they are... the more they need to invest in order to be able to support a remote workforce. I think that they're certainly struggling for this but a lot of information is decentralized in across all the departments of the Government of Canada, and I'm sure that the CIO councils are trying to gather this information. I haven't seen anything about a concerted effort to evaluate and track the progress of the internet access and availability of access to the internal network of the Government of Canada.
I'm on the outside though so it's very possible that these conversations are happening elsewhere, but a lot of the problem comes down to this idea that there's a government network that all of the secure information will be held within this government network, and that if you... you need to go often and get clearance in order to get access to that network and then once you're on the network, you can be more loosey goosey about what happens inside there with the permissions and configurations and access to information that you can just assume that anyone who has access to the government network has what they need to to access it. I think that's part of the challenge that there's a lot of stuff that has been put inside of the government network that probably should never be there.
There are things like MediaWiki is installed on... in Government of Canada instances in their various different government departments, but the big one is GCpedia and with GCpedia like at the moment you can only access that through the VPN. There's no other way to access GCpedia. So all of that knowledge base of information they could just expose GCPedia to the public and have an authorization system so that you need to be able to log in through MediaWiki in order to access any of the content on the page. That wouldn't be that hard to go from to set up for them, but it will require a way of thinking about how security is managed and how they deal with this... deal with a more permeable membrane between the government network and the internet. I think that one of the elements I was really interested in is the idea of building an internet and committing to building an internet that is okay for secure transactions, and many people will go off and remember the Heartbleed bug of a few years back.
It cost a few trillion dollars in the economy, it was a fairly significant impact for the economy and as a result of that many organizations started contributing to an initiative that is managed by the Apache Foundation called the Core Infrastructure Initiative, and the point of this is to take... to look at the files that are critical to maintaining a secure internet and to make sure that there's enough people reviewing those little files for security to make sure that there isn't... that we don't have another Heartbleed bug issue again. That $3 trillion economic... or the $3 trillion expense happened essentially because one little file has been maintained by one or two people on the side of their desk for a period of decades and just hadn't gotten the attention that it deserved, and there was an exploit that was within that that was not fixed in the internet because people were not contributing back to this open source software.
Another thing that I'd like to think about is this idea of internet exchanges, and for government towns like for that matter Ottawa and Toronto and Victoria, there's government towns where there's a lot of critical government infrastructure that is being... that should be shared. That we should have common fiber or potentially common wireless available that is available in these heavily government oriented municipalities. Not that it needs to be limited to that but there are communities that have invested in fiber and have had a faster, more reliable, more resilient infrastructure. But for the longest time governments have built relationships with Bell and Rogers to provide them with internet access and I don't think that those have really demonstrated that they're as resilient as we need particularly in times of crisis like this.
Richard Pietro:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Mike Gifford:
A packet of information to jump between department A and department B should not have to get routed through a server in Chicago, in order to get back to jump between the two departments but often that's what needs to happen. There isn't enough of an emphasis on building a resilient, redundant infrastructure in our municipalities to make sure that the packets are kept local wherever possible, and only sit outside of the city when we need to do that.
Richard Pietro:
This is getting pretty technical for a lot of us. We're talking about packets and things along those lines and analogy... we've had this discussion before and an analogy we used at the time was this idea of sort of carpooling a little bit for these internet exchanges. I forget at the time, did you agree with that analogy or would you reframe it?
Mike Gifford:
I think that carpooling is probably... I mean that's not a bad analogy. CIRA has a really interesting model where they visualize this as well, and the way that they provided their visualization was that right now each department has their own freeway to the Internet, and they're maintaining independent freeways to the internet to exchange information back and forth and so from the Ottawa example, department A would need to get onto the Queen's way in order to get to department B, even if they're all... if they're both located in downtown Ottawa. Whereas if we just sort of built around about in the downtown core for information then you could get off where it was appropriate for you to get off, and not necessarily have to jump onto the freeway in order to communicate to your neighbours.
Richard Pietro:
Got you, got you. I want to go back to open source right now because you were very clear about some of the things that governments are doing wrong when it comes to open source and how they should view it, but have you come across any government initiatives or any governments in general that are doing open source right?
Mike Gifford:
I think that there are governments that definitely are and that are doing some really interesting work. The European Union has had a lot to try and promote open source. I think that they see this as part of a way of trying to build more economic independence from largely American tech companies, and that's certainly an issue for us here in Canada as well. France in particular has seen a whole series of businesses pop up because they're able to leverage open source tools in order to be able to provide high level support for larger organizations, and if the developers weren't able to stand on the shoulders of giants in order to be able to do that, then there's no way to be able to accomplish these tasks. If everyone was trying to go off and to code from scratch the work that needs to be done, then it wouldn't be possible for a small organization to be able to meet the requirements of government much of the time, but leveraging open source software you can.
You can access millions of dollars worth of software for free if you're able to leverage open source code effectively, and so there definitely are small businesses and government agencies that are able to do this. I've been really impressed by the open source community in the US government particularly under Obama, there was some really interesting things that came out of it. There was code.gov was one of the initiatives that came out of it, 18F is another one you can see a lot of the code that has been used in Canada and other government departments has been shared on the 18F's GitHub page.
Richard Pietro:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Mike Gifford:
There's a lot of governments that are sharing code and policy and documentation through GitHub, and that's really wonderful to see all of the ways that that's been being done. That's exciting to see, I'm also excited to see things like the Australian Government has made a big commitment to using Drupal and to invest in a distribution of Drupal that there... that's able to be used consistently across government departments and to really drive cost down, because they can build a single distribution that is able to go off and to meet the security and accessibility requirements of the government and be able to implement that. I've got to say I'm also really impressed by a lot of the work that StatsCan has done, StatsCan with their Drupal WET distribution and all the work they're doing on Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure. It's really visionary stuff and it's amazing to see a small team of people in a government department really going off and moving ahead, and sharing some best practices to the government and to others that really are able help advance the bar and to see that the government is actually able to see that these tools and technologies are really able to off, and serve not just the needs of a particular department but the government as a whole and society at large.
Richard Pietro:
You just mentioned WET which stands for the Web Experience Toolkit, which was from my understanding one of the very first open source projects coming out of the Treasury Board Secretariat, and I remember this was happening I think around the 2011s.
Mike Gifford:
Yep.
Richard Pietro:
And at the time speaking to some of the people because it was such a trailblazing exercise, there was a lot of meetings, a lot of conversations, a lot of legal. It was an experience or an experiment that they really didn't know what was going to come out of it. The Web Experience Toolkit became sort of a standard across Canada for building web accessible templates based on open source code. Were you at all in part as a community member in those conversations in those early days?
Mike Gifford:
Yeah, I definitely was and it was definitely an exciting era to go from be involved in and it was nice to see Paul Jackson and Mary-Beth involved in the WIRED Magazine. You don't see government departments anywhere in the world featured in Wired magazine all that often.
Richard Pietro:
Oh, my I didn't know that.
Mike Gifford:
Yeah, there's a great picture they look a little younger than they do now but-
Richard Pietro:
You're talking Mary-Beth Baker?
Mike Gifford:
Yes, that's right. So there was... there's really interesting times to pull that together, and I think the project... a lot of effort was put into this in terms of policy and regulation and sort of what it would be like for the government to contribute a code... a front end framework to the community using GitHub. It was exciting to see that, but they never really had the resources that they needed like it was always understaffed and run in a very tight manner. So things like documentation was a problem and still is a problem trying to go off and make sure that there's a clear set of documentation around how to actually implement this.
Things like roadmaps, so how do you try and... where is WET going next? What are the concerns that are going to be addressed in the next release? They did such an amazing job given the resources that they had and it really does stand outside of Canada as well as it stands inside Canada, but it also needs to have... it's one of the things where the web has changed a lot since then, and there hasn't really been the investment in WET that there needs to be to maintain this framework.
Richard Pietro:
So you have been... we've just talked about you've been in this space for a long time.
Mike Gifford:
It's true.
Richard Pietro:
Do you think that we now need to rethink the open government, open data and open source movements in the context of COVID-19? Has COVID-19 changed anything when we think about those movements?
Mike Gifford:
I think that one thing that does... we do need to rethink is just... I've been involved in promoting open source in organizations for over 20 years and there... we haven't made as much progress as I would have wanted. Whether it's open government, open data, open source like all of those are... there's been some... there's a geeky clan of people who've gotten excited by this and have... and understand why it matters, but we haven't really extended beyond that geeky clan of people. I think what we need to rethink is what we're... what our aspirations are, and who do we need to bring together to go actually understand how these geeky ideas really do matter and that they... that we need to start investing them if we're going to be able to build a resilient infrastructure that we need.
So I think that the... Yeah, we haven't seen a lot of collaboration or as much collaboration around this, and how do we try and not just use these open approaches as a way to save a bit of money which hopefully we can, but also really to allow for innovation to happen and it allows innovation to happen inside of government. One of the projects that I didn't mention but I should have mentioned, is all of the open source work that's been done by... in the UK Government and The Notify project that the... or the Notification project was developed by the GDS team that the Canadian Digital Services team went off and was able to take advantage of and start leveraging that out. So we're using a common code base to go off into to build a messaging service that is used and available for departments across... in the Government of Canada to be able to reach out to citizens through email, through SMS and eventually I'm sure to other means of communication as well.
So it's nice to see this leveraging of open source tools but it took teams to be able to sort of... to sit down and to think about what are the opportunities for us to collaborate and what are the things that we can contribute back to make sure that this tool is more bilingual, is more accessible, is more secure? I was happy to say that the Canadian Digital Services has done that. It has really taken a forward thinking approach to using open source software that has been pioneered in other government departments, and been able to find ways to apply that and we just need this to be the norm and not the exception. I don't see why every government department out there, every IT team is looking out and finding ways to leverage tools and patterns and libraries that are being used by other government departments that have similar functions inside their own government department infrastructure.
Richard Pietro:
It's funny because you're really sort of talking about one of the things that I've been harping on for a number of years now, which is sort of the marketing of open Gov, Open Data, open source within the community and governments in general as well, which is these tools exist but I don't think we've done a very good job of explaining their relevance, their value, breaking... and essentially the culture of government, right? Just sort we always talk about siloed governments, and they don't talk to each other.
Mike Gifford:
Yeah.
Richard Pietro:
We always talk about how one of the biggest users of open data sets for example is the government, because now they don't need to go through all the different channels down the red tapes to get access. So I think we as a community need to do a better job of essentially marketing and selling our movements because unlike many movements, we don't have sort of a David Suzuki Foundation behind us to promote and invest a lot of money in some of these things. So we're sort of left on our own on that one.
Mike Gifford:
No, absolutely. I was thinking about how the... a lot of the work that's been done with open data was actually stuff that even inside the government departments before the call for open data it wasn't available. So there were tool sets that's... Sorry, there were data sets that were sitting on in somebody's desk and was there... in their fiefdom and that they didn't want to release or didn't want us to share information back and forth, or agree to a common data standard because they preferred organizing dates one way, and somebody else in another section of the department preferred organizing dates another way.
Richard Pietro:
Yeah.
Mike Gifford:
So you'd have these different varying datasets, but when you suddenly have to start publishing the information under a common open DNS format. You just look like complete amateurs if you have different data formats and otherwise largely identical data. One of the things I think is a huge need with the open data community is not necessarily focusing on publishing more, but trying to get government employees to look at consuming open data more, and what can they do as consumers and how can they engage with other producers of open data to go off and be able to really build a community around those data sets? So maybe there's a privacy issue that a publisher isn't aware of that you could combine different data sets to gather information about individuals with open datasets that are being published or accessed.
Maybe it's just about inconsistencies, that flaws in the data but how do we build those feedback loops within government so that the Ontario government is actively looking at the federal data and looking to contribute to and benefit from the work that's being done on different levels because there's so much data that's out there, but there, I don't think there's a real effort to find, to build a community around those datasets that there's the ability to critique and review and improve those data sets over time.
Richard Pietro:
I need to mention this real quick because I live in Toronto and I've worked very closely with the city of Toronto's open data team, and that's one of the things I give them full credit for. When they decided to revamp their Open Data program a few years ago, they definitely took a leadership position, because they have the resources, they have the budget so compared to a city like Sudbury or Timmins or even say Kingston, they have people that can work on developing sort of a template and that's what they've done when it comes to their open data portal and their Open Data program. So they've created a kind of cookie cutter that any other jurisdiction in Ontario and I'm assuming around the world could literally grab and just put and install right into their government.
Mike Gifford:
One of the challenges... I mean that's great to hear. One of the big challenges that a lot of times, developers and techies in general don't want to leverage other people's work, they want to do it themselves because they think they can do it better and faster and easier. So often we underestimate the complexity of the problems that we're taking on and want to be given the freedom to be able to explore the solution in a way that makes sense for us. But when you do that often you can't take advantage of all of the learnings that you get from building on somebody else's dataset.
Now, it could be that the structure that's built for the City of Toronto is more complicated than will be required for Wolfville Nova Scotia. But there should be some similarities and if there aren't then there should be enough... there's enough small municipalities that have this common need that should be able to unite together under the leadership of the Federation of Canadian municipalities or other organizations to go off, and to build those tools at a scale that's relevant for them that allows them to track the things that are going to help them be able to make better decisions going forward.
Richard Pietro:
So we've talked a lot about open source and things of that nature and websites, but one of... a lot of your work is actually focused more on web accessibility and by that we're talking about things like disabilities like blindness, how can a blind person navigate the web? Now there are some legislations that mandate that websites be web accessible, but they're often not adhered to. Why do you think that is and how can we get over that Trump... over that Trump. How can we get over that hump? And full disclosure I do have a website reopen gov.org and I refuse to believe it would pass the web accessibility test, but I still want to ask the question nonetheless.
Mike Gifford:
So the most important thing about web accessibility is to keep in mind that this is a journey, your website is never going to be 100% accessible you just need to focus on learning more and making sure that every day your site is a little bit more accessible than it was before. If you take that mindset then you can reach out and find some basic tools and find some flaws in it, and look for ways to start asking questions on a regular basis to see what can you do to it to be better? So that's definitely a huge part of the mindset that we try to go off and building with our communications with our clients, and it's been interesting like web accessibility is a really... the big challenges is that there hasn't really been enforcement and everyone is so excited by the newest shiny flashy tools, that they're not looking at how do they address the needs of people with disabilities and that's... people think about this as a really small portion of the population but it's actually pretty significant.
It's not just blind users and deaf users I mean there are certainly those people but it's also one in seven people according to StatsCan. So if you've got a team of seven people there's probably one of them that has a... identifies as having at least one disability. That can be dyslexia, it can be color blindness, it can be mobility challenges. There's so many different ways that people interact with digital tools and with the physical world, but with digital tools as well in this context. If you can write off one in seven people and certainly the Government of Canada can't legitimately write off one in seven people, most businesses can't afford to write off one in seven people but it hasn't sort of been at the forefront.
The other side is I try to think about accessibility in terms of not just the people with permanent disabilities, but there's people with temporary disabilities and people with situational disabilities. So, for instance recently I went off and I kicked a ball for my dog and I have been trying to stay off of it because I think I fractured a bone in my foot.
Richard Pietro:
Oh, wow.
Mike Gifford:
Yeah, this is a month ago. It's like this is still so annoying, but I mean... and I can walk on it but it just... it causes me pain so I don't go very far and I don't walk like I used to until my foot feels better. But that's a clear example of a temporary disability if you are... there're all sorts of people who have temporary disabilities that are because of medication or injuries. There are all kinds of ways even just all the people who have glasses and wear glasses, and if they don't have their glasses with them then they can't necessarily read the email that they would with a proper prescription glasses on. So, that's a really simple example of a temporary disability.
Situational disabilities are another one that a lot of people face, if you've got a nice sunny office and the sun comes in and it's beautiful and whatnot, it's really hard to see your screen to be able to see the content that... whereas opposed if you're sitting in the darkroom. Another great example is how many presentations have you seen that it's really hard to read because they were built on a desktop that has really crisp definition, but then they're broadcast on a LED/LCD projector and with some additional light bleeding in and it's really hard to figure out what it is that there is that they're trying to say with this gray on gray background. So that's a situational disability, if they were doing the presentation at night then it wouldn't be a problem because there'd be no light bleeding in, but in the daytime with sunlight then that's a huge issue for people. We don't think about these implications because we're used to creating content in an ideal environment, and that's just not how people are living and working with technology anymore.
Technology is with us basically 24 hours a day and if we may want to be accessing it on our phone, or through our Google home device, or through virtual reality or through... there are so many ways that we interact and engage with other technology beyond just our desktop computers. So we need to start thinking about how do we think about improving the access of our information and digital content however people want to be consuming it. So right now with the COVID crisis, this is another example where people who are in the public sector were able to effectively communicate and work together because they were in person most of the time and those meetings were in person, and they built tools and approaches to deal with those in person meetings.
When you suddenly bring it so that everything is digital then suddenly maybe somebody has a harder time hearing somebody, and making... and communicating with them because they can't see the subtle gestures that they make, or that there's a slight delay that makes it difficult for them to focus on the work. There're elements where we're just not having a high bandwidth, for instances is there something that can make it very difficult and slow for people to access information, because the sites were built assuming that you had high speed broadband access to navigate it, and that's just not the reality when everyone is working from home, you can't assume that everyone has bandwidth.
Richard Pietro:
Actually it's an interesting point that you bring up because one of the fun stories that I like to talk when I mentioned web accessibility or accessibility in general, is that oftentimes while accessibility is viewed as a cost, right? It takes a lot more time, it takes some work. The benefits are not just for those one out of sevens, a lot of the times those benefits come for the general public like for example, having a much quicker website but the story that I always use is one from Toronto which deals with transit.
Mike Gifford:
Right.
Richard Pietro:
So when you jump on a streetcar or when you jump on a bus, there's auditory signals like you're approaching this stop like there's a... it tells you what stop you're coming to it and you cannot... there's also a visual cue that says you're approaching this stop. Even though I'm fully capable I'm not someone that I would identify as having disabilities. Those are extraordinarily helpful but the only reason why those are on streetcars and subways and buses is because of a lawsuit from disabled communities in Toronto, who said to the TTC, how are we supposed to know what stop we're at?
Mike Gifford:
Yeah.
Richard Pietro:
There's got to be better ways, so they introduce all this technology and it turns out that it helps a lot more than one out of seven people.
Mike Gifford:
It's absolutely true and I remember back when they started adding the automatic door openers to doors at Carleton University and seeing how many people were using those to get in and out of the open doors when they could just open the door. There's nothing stopping them from opening the door but they found it just that much easier just to tap the button than to carry on through.
Richard Pietro:
Or if they're carrying like groceries, that's one of those like sort of situational disabilities that you would think of. You got your hands full of groceries, you bump it with your butt or you bump it with your foot and
Mike Gifford:
Yeah, it's so useful to have that, and curb cuts are another one that people often point to. I think the reality is that we're all trying to juggle so many things, and at this time we're juggling more than ever as people are working from home, and often trying to balance kids and families and work and friends and there's so many things coming at so many different levels. We don't really have a quiet space to focus on the work at hand and be able to off and manage that. So trying to make sure that it's accessible and organized and really written in plain language, so that it's something that people can understand as they're managing their busy, chaotic, hectic lives. I think that's a really important part of accessibility and something that people often overlook.
Richard Pietro:
Okay, so we got to start thinking about wrapping up the episode here, but before we go I want to give you an opportunity. Is there anything that we haven't discussed yet that you want to bring up?
Mike Gifford:
I guess there's two things that I think are worthwhile going off and adding. One is that that we just recently added an accessible business hub, it's AccessibleBusinessHub.ca. and that's essentially a space to organize information not just for businesses but for people with disabilities, and for organizations who are looking at understanding what the implications of COVID are for people with disabilities in Canada, and try have something that's specifically focused on Canadian legislation and best practices here for dealing with this virus. So that's that's a small initiative that we're involved in and excited about trying to look at ways for us to help better support a community of people with disabilities in Canada.
The other thing is we've got a newsletter that we've been putting out for the last seven months, and there's a lot of information there about accessibility and trying to raising awareness about this issue in the various different complexities behind it, because this is something that is a really deep issue and I'm an accessibility expert but there's so much that I don't know, there's so much that is beyond what I've had experience with. So sort of being able to point to other resources and to engage people with the process of learning and becoming part of the journey of looking at web accessibility and to improve their content over time.
Richard Pietro:
Well, you're doing some fantastic work and like you were mentioning you've been in the space for 20 years and I have a feeling you'll be in the space for a lot longer, and we need people like you in the community to keep sort of preaching the choir or not preaching to the choir but singing the gospel, that's the term I'm looking for. So we thank you for that and then please don't stop.
Mike Gifford:
Thank you Richard, you've organized some really amazing interviews and it has been really flattering to be amongst so many of the amazing people that you've brought on to your podcast, so I really appreciate this opportunity to talk with you.
Richard Pietro:
Oh, it was my pleasure and thank you for being part of the interview, and we also want to thank our audience for listening and as usual please leave us a rating or a comment on how to make the podcast better, or if there's any guests or any stories that you'd like to hear. So, until next time let's make it open.