• Germany | Creating a more transparent Frankfurt
  Frankfurt-Gestalten.de (Create Frankfurt) is a new space for citizen participation: the aim is tracking local political decisions, making them more transparent and motivate citizens to connect locally and to discuss on how to change their neighborhood.
  The website offers information in form of geo-referenced data and documents properly tagged. It also offer an email service and space for comments and proposals.

• Norway | When it comes to open data, potential is not enough.
  Norway and the other Scandinavian countries are potential open data champions, thanks to an established tradition of transparency in government. And it's true that there's a lot going on when it comes to open data: some months ago PDF speaker Bente Kalsnes listed an incredible amount of projects and initiatives.
  But apparently it's not enough to reach a noteworthy level.

My trip to Gov 2.0 Camp LA commenced with a comedy of errors: lost luggage, a flooded hotel room and flooded streets due to the rains. After a night of little sleep, I arrived at the BlankSpaces co-working location to the company of like-minded people from diverse professional backgrounds but all joining the search for using technology and innovation to improve government. In camp style, we each used the 3 word model to describe why we were there. I thought the focus really centered around engaging new paradigms since people from government, major corporations, start-ups, film industry and media were all together to learn and share ideas.

While there was no shortage of technical expertise present, most of the concepts discussed spoke to a high level of education and interest in the Gov 2.0 space, with sessions ranging from how to properly define gov 2.0 to specific tactics to use in social media within government. The biggest takeaways from the event: focus on people, build replicable solutions, and engage in expansive, multi-pronged outreach and public awareness campaigns.

Two months ago, we found a Craigslist post requesting volunteers to help the city of San Francisco create their own version of data.gov.

The site--DataSF--just launched, and while it's no data.gov, it's definitely a valuable list of data feeds. After browsing through the categories (health, geography, crime, environment, elections, housing, transportation, & public works), it looks like a much better collection than what DC was providing this time last year for their first Apps for Democracy project. (DC's data catalog has since greatly expanded.)

Tomorrow at 1 pm--a few hours after Michael Bloomberg's keynote at the PdF Conference--the New York City Council will hold a hearing on a proposed bill to open all city data. Quoting Sam Wong,

The bill will require the City to create a centralized online repository of all publicly available information that is either produced or retained by the City. Furthermore, data published under this legislation will be done so in a format that will be readable by any computer device, whether that is a laptop or a phone. Not only will this collection of information be invaluable to elected officials, other government agencies and public advocates, but it can also be used by private citizens who could use the information in ingenious and unforeseen ways.

A few days ago, I wrote about Chris Kemp, the CIO of NASA's Ames Research Center, and his experimentation with a more modern information philosophy. His post on the future of NASA's Web presence was soon followed with another on the value of open data: "Why Make a Universe of Data Open to the Public?". One of the first projects to use NASA's opened data is Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope. They are also working with Cisco to build a climate change monitoring platform.

There are countless reasons to open your data: education, error proofing, and the simple fact that government data belongs to citizens are some. But the best reasons to open data are the ones we don't yet realize: you open data not just because it allows you do to X, Y and Z, but because it allows you to do ANYTHING. If NASA's data ever becomes available to independent Web developers, that's when the really interesting things will start happening.

Kemp's plans have internal opponents, though.

This is two months old, but we missed it: Chris Kemp, the CIO of NASA's Ames Research Center (the place responsible for the just-launched Kepler satellite and the next-generation Mars rovers), wrote a blog post about the future he envisions for NASA's Web presence:

A long time interest of mine has been how can we weave NASA's data into the fabric of the web, and what that will mean for the future of space exploration...

I will talk about the web as a platform...and how NASA will use this platform to share our data with the world. I will talk about Silicon Valley...about new partnerships that we are forging here. [Ames is less than a mile from the Google campus.] I'll give you my thoughts on how we are teaming up with some of the larger companies here in the Valley to syndicate one of NASA's greatest resources, our scientific data and our out-of-this-world images and videos.

The National Counterterrorism Center has published a huge data set on its Web site. The Worldwide Incidents Tracking System has a few thousand records of violent acts going back to 2004, and it's begging to be downloaded by a Flash guru who can show the government why open data is a good practice.

They'd Check the "It's Complicated" Box; The Oppositional Approach to Getting from Here to Five Million; Transition's Tech Team Taps Beltway and Beyond; Government Guide to Marijuana (Vendors); Nanobama, the Microscopic President; DC's Apps Contest Names Winners; Progressives' Annual Participatory Debrief; and more.