I've been following the Open Data / Open Government movement for more than a year now. My interests are two-fold: as an IT professional who has been helping companies and organizations use data to make more effective decisions; and as a citizen who want government to be more transparent in its actions and more effective in spending tax-payers' monies.
There seems to be a lot of interest in unlocking or releasing data about transit, parks, schools, properties (ie. the infrastructure of a city or political unit) but not a lot of effort on opening up the process of government (ie governance).
To have a more transparent government requires that the process be open for review, and to do that, citizens need to know whether their elected representatives are fulfilling their promises or election platform on a micro-level.
I would like to see data regarding councilor voting released. Each item at a council meeting that requires a vote should be tagged and / or categorized using a specific ontology, and the vote (yes, no, abstain, absence) for each councilor recorded.
It would be interesting to run some data-mining algorithms on this data to see if councilors vote in clusters, if a councillor follows their platform / promises, or if a councilor treats their ward differently than other wards and on what issues.
Government can only be Open if the process of governing is transparent. Let's see what municipality / region / province leads on tranparency?
