Victoria Coun. Marianne Alto wants to open the doors to the city's data vaults.

Alto will present two detailed motions for debate by councillors next week that, if enacted, would see the city adopt an "open data policy," paving the way for everything from live video streaming of council meetings to automatic electronic release of all council reports.

It would mean that any data produced by the city (with the exception of in-camera items such as legal, land or labour issues) would be easily accessible by the taxpayer.

Alto said it's about engaging citizens on their own terms. "Part of this is about open government — by really throwing open the door and saying you have a right as a resident to see everything that I'm doing as an elected representative. You have a right to see everything that the staff are doing at the city on your behalf," she said.

"You also have a right as a resident to take that information and do stuff with it."

Currently in Victoria, and in many other jurisdictions, a lot of information is available online, but it's often difficult to find and only available in certain readable-only formats, she said.

An open data system allows for easier search and access all kinds of data, ranging from garbage collection dates to road construction closures to council decisions.

For example, every vote a councillor makes would be recorded. The system would then allow a resident to search out something like "Marianne Alto — council votes."

"You would get a list of all of my decisions in the time that I have been a councillor. And it will tell you, without you having to go and search line-by-line, minute-by-minute for all of the things I've voted for and against," Alto said.

Councillors' negative votes are already recorded but tracking them is a painstaking process of reading through all the minutes of all the council meetings.

"With this kind of a system, you get to go in and say: 'I wonder what everybody has ever said about the marina development over the past five years?' You'll be able to go in and search that topic and it will come out for you in an easy way," Alto said.

Mayor Dean Fortin supports Alto's initiative.

"It will really hold councillors accountable," he said from the Union of B.C. Municipalities convention in Vancouver.

"People can really go in and see how we vote on a consistent basis. Right now, we only record negative votes and this way, if every vote is recorded, somebody could literally in the future type in Dean Fortin and see every vote I've ever made on any subject. ... So it's not just how you vote leading up to an election but how you voted for the last three years."

Open-data policies have been enacted in jurisdictions including Ottawa, Edmonton, Toronto, Vancouver, Nanaimo and Surrey .

From online banking to electronic library data searches, an increasingly computer-literate society is coming to expect ease of access to information, Alto said.

"The fact that we can't do this for city hall information, I think, is indicative of the fact we haven't paid enough attention to this new expectation by residents," she said.

Fortin said much of the data is probably already available online, "but it's really hard to get. We want to make it easy."

Initially, the idea is to have staff report back on costs associated with implementing the policy.

Fortin said implementation would likely be incremental and it is important that the policy be made a priority.

"We make thousands of decisions and a lot are never discussed on the campaign trail. So it's more about an opportunity for the citizens to choose the people that reflect their values," Fortin said.

bcleverley@timescolonist.com