We’re changing, but hopefully you won’t even notice

January 31, 2018

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APA	Open Government, Government of Canada. (2018, January 31). We’re changing, but hopefully you won’t even notice. Retrieved from http://open.canada.ca/en/blog/were-changing-hopefully-you-wont-even-notice
MLA	“We’re changing, but hopefully you won’t even notice.” Open Government, Government of Canada, 31 January 2018, http://open.canada.ca/en/blog/were-changing-hopefully-you-wont-even-notice

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Digital service are never fully “completed,” (iterative development for the win!) and open.canada.ca is no exception. This week, we are excited to say that we’ve made a foundational investment to support future responsiveness by migrating the infrastructure of open.canada.ca to cloud hosting and upgrading to Drupal 8. Ideally, you didn’t even notice.

Since 2011, open.canada.ca has been the Government of Canada’s one-stop shop for Open Data and Information. The portal contains tens of thousands of records from over 200 Government of Canada institutions and we’re constantly trying to improve both the content and the user experience.

Why move to the cloud?

The move to cloud hosting will allow for an architecture that is both scalable and adaptable. Organizationally, we’re strengthening our team to support operations and ongoing development. This move aligns well with our Cloud Adoption Strategy and supports our Digital Principles, which will shape how we manage our information going forward, how we acquire and use technology, and how we provide the best services to Canadians.

Open.canada.ca will continue to be powered by Solr, our search engine; CKAN, our records management system; and by an updated implementation of Drupal 8, our content management system. All of the code that underlies the platform is open source and is on Github.

The driving force for this change is better service to Canadians and government agencies and departments that use open.canada.ca as a platform. We’re building a user-focused digital service to evolve open.canada.ca into a vibrant marketplace of data and information as well as providing opportunities to participate and learn. The portal, and the team that supports it, will work as part of a network of developers, content creators, businesses and internal GC programs and services.

The next steps

The technical migration was completed today (January 31st 2018), and we’ve worked hard to ensure a seamless transition. The organizational transition continues and we’re looking forward to working more closely with the growing community of open government developers, users and content providers.

If you run into any issues, or have questions or suggestions about open.canada.ca, email us at open-ouvert@tbs-sct.gc.ca. You can also sign up for email updates.

The Open Government Portal Team

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