Open government data in practice | Opensource.com

"There is no doubt that open data is an important public policy area—one that is here to stay. Yet, for all the grand promises, scratch beneath the surface and one finds a remarkable paucity of hard empirical facts about what is and isn't happening on the ground—in the real world of cities where most of us increasingly live and work. Recent results from Citadel-on-the-Move, a 4 million Euro project funded by the European Commission, are beginning to fill this gap, particularly in terms of better understanding existing open data practice (as opposed to best practice theory). The Citadel was grounded in the conviction that the power of open data remains untapped. The project aimed to unleash this power by empowering civil servants and citizens with simple and easy-to-use open source tools to publish and use open data. During the course of this work, The Citadel subsequently engaged over 140 cities from across six continents—uncovering a treasure trove of new findings about the local open data landscape in the process ..."