OpenGov Voices: Does open data improve governance? Of course! - Sunlight Foundation Blog

"But my love for data is only one reason I have devoted my career to the open data movement. A bigger reason is that I believe open data can actually improve democracy ... Even today, most of the cities opening their datasets are large and have money to invest in technology and try things. There are some smaller, leading cities, such as Palo Alto, Calif., but so far they are the outliers. It’s not that cities don’t want to open up data. Rather, they either simply feel it’s out of reach for one reason or another, or they cannot yet measure the impact of an open data program ... At Junar our main focus has been on making open data so simple that a lot of small and midsize cities – cities that aren’t usually on the leading edge and don’t think they have budgets to embrace open data – can have it. Junar is a cloud-based data platform that enables businesses, governments and other organizations to free their data in order to drive new opportunities, collaboration and transparency. The platform works by collecting, enhancing, publishing, sharing and analyzing data ... "