I've been thinking a lot recently about the accessibility of information that the government collects sometimes even distributes. We've blogged about problems getting information about postal code to riding data in the past. We ended up purchasing the data, but each time we do it is so inefficient it seems like it must cost the government more to sell it to me than give it away. Fortunately, there's been a lot of movement in this area around the world and there are a lot of good things to be inspired by.
In the USA today the Obama administration launched Data.gov which aims to "increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government." Now, government datasets seem pretty boring on the outset, but if you are trying to understand a problem it could be just the information you need. They are offering data in XML, CVS, Text, KML & map data. No restrictions (that I could see) on how I use the data. They've even got a rating system, and a call for other suggestions. This is a great step forward.
