The one thing that hit me over and over again at this expo are the creative, useful and problem-solving applications which can be created by the diligent, misunderstood and often unthanked action of data availability and transparency.

I attended a government data transparency conference a few months ago, and the speakers there gave some of the most dry and uninteresting talks about XML standardization and its relationship to compliancy and data transparency.  The significance of it all didn’t hit me even there, but today I’ve seen 50 some odd brilliant applications of people making government more real and more relevant to the people, just by being able to build off of – and then contribute back to – the streams of public data.

So, as an example, when you take that old WMATA debate about whether or not to open up the DC Metro system’s transit info to Google Transit – you only need listen to all of the cool things that San Francisco’s BART system has had developed by the community, just by opening that data up.

Definitely something to reflect on, so that we can work out how best to use this trend to provide more to the community on our Gov 2.0 apps!

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