Right now, Open Government Data (OGD) is quite a popular topic for governments worldwide. I’m a member of the W3C’s eGovernment interest group, and OGD is one of the topics we’re currently working on.

The most important point to make regarding OGD, and it applies in this case, is that the data IS available. It might not be in a format that is intelligible to a citizen, but initially, that’s not important. Making the data available is the first step, and is just setting a foundation for further improvement. Once the data is available, it can be used by third parties who can develop their own applications to help interpret the data.

So, you take something like data.gov and all its raw data, unintelligible to the common citizen, and you get something like Sunlight Labs Apps for America project which churns out DataMasher and This We Know, both third party applications that derive meaning from the government provided raw data.

It’s a question of capability for governments at this point. I think it is a bit too much to expect local governments to provide data transparency at a level that even the Feds (and everyone else in the world) haven’t quite gotten around to yet.

I’m surprised and glad to see Akron taking this step, whatever the reasons, and it would be wonderful if more local and regional governments (like Jefferson County, Colorado) became interested in opening their data.

Another example: Board of Elections history data could be easily manipulated to find out turnout trends for particular precincts, or manipulated in whatever manner you might imagine.

Please pardon the long, meaty comment. This is something I’ve been studying for months now.