Backyard city hall

Local governments are releasing data in the hopes (and fears) that citizens will make it meaningful and "perhaps think differently about their city and its government." New York Times published a story today on city governments' release of formerly hard-to-get data sets which might change the way local governments "deliver programs, services and promises."

Advocates of these open-data efforts say they can help citizens figure out what is going on in their backyards and judge how their government is performing...

By releasing data in easy-to-use formats, cities and states hope that people will create sites or applications that use it in ways City Hall never would have considered.