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 "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 it wasn't accessible. You couldn't easily search by name, filter by organization, or see trends over time. The information was technically public but practically hidden.

The Solution

I built Pay-Lens as a dashboard that makes this data searchable, filterable, and visual. You can look up any name, see salary trends, compare organizations, and explore the data in ways the original format never allowed.

What I Learned

Open Data Has Real Demand

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

Simplicity Wins

The most valuable feature wasn't a fancy visualization — it was the search bar. People just wanted to look up a name and see the results quickly.

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 resonate.

Building in Public

Pay-Lens is one of several ventures under Seaway Digital. It represents something I believe in strongly: taking publicly available information and making it genuinely useful. Data transparency shouldn't require technical skills to access.