Open Data in Ontario: What Pay-Lens Taught Me About Transparency

Pay-Lens started as a curiosity project. Ontario publishes salary disclosure data for public sector employees earning over $100,000, the list most people know as the Sunshine List. The data is public, but it was buried in PDFs and spreadsheets that were painful to navigate.

The Problem

The raw data existed, but nobody could use it. You couldn't easily search by name, filter by organization, or see trends over time. The information was technically public and practically hidden.

The Solution

I built Pay-Lens as a dashboard you can actually search. You can look up a name, filter by organization, and see how numbers changed year over year, none of which the original format allowed.

What I Learned

Open Data Has Real Demand

People care about how public money gets spent. The response to Pay-Lens showed me there's genuine appetite for tools that make government data usable.

Simplicity Wins

The search bar mattered more than any of the charts I built. People wanted to look up a name and get an answer, and everything else was secondary.

Side Projects Can Have Impact

What started as a weekend experiment became something thousands of people use every year when the new data drops. You never know which project will land.

Building in Public

Pay-Lens is one of several ventures under Seaway Digital, and it's the one I care most about on principle. Public information should be usable by people who aren't technical. Right now, a lot of it isn't.