Can you find any easter eggs?

In 2014 I had the privilege of traveling across Canada in a jet plane, as well as on the internet, to listen to what some Canadians had to say about Canada’s Action Plan on Open Government.

The purpose of this post is to introduce you to one of the outputs of that exercise; the release of all the consultation comments collected as open data. Some of this data might be relevant to the conversation on principles for engagement between governments and citizens. Part of that conversation is taking place at the Canadian Open Dialogue Forum next week in Ottawa.

This dataset is the same one I used to perform some high level qualitative analysis that informed the development of the action plan for 2014-16. That analysis is described in the what we heard report. My thinking is that the data may contain some undiscovered insights, some easter eggs if you will. Easter eggs you might be able to find.

The data contains the actual text of comments collected, as well as metadata and the codes we applied during the analysis. One of these is the “core code” (data, info, or dialogue). Filter the comments by the dialogue core code and you end up with 322 comments that might be fun to analyze in the context of the conversation around principles. These comments have location, theme, subthemes and other metadata to play with.

Here is a link to the data and release notes on the open.canada web site.  If you are up for a little easter egg hunt, please explore.

Be sure to share your discoveries using the hashtags #CODF16 and #OpenGovCan, or leave a comment here.

Hoppy easter everybody!

Thom