In September, the Martin Prosperity Institute, based in Toronto, published a report called “Open Data, Open Cities” extolling the major benefits of open-data at the municipal level. In conjunction with our translation of the document, to be released soon, I spent five minutes speaking with one of the authors, Kimberly Silk to better understand the report and the Martin Prosperity Institute. Let us know what you think.

The conservative party of Canada has yet to adopt an open-data policy, but the British “equivalent” is at least talking the right talk. Agree or not with his policies, David Cameron, the new UK PM, gives a solid TED talk on open-data.

Below is a classic presentation on the importance of visualizing data from government databases that has been seen more than 3 million times and is now a TED and open-data classic. Doctor Hans Rosling uses open-data from the UN and government agencies to demonstrate the enormous progress that has been made in the wealth and health in Asia and South America. His use of simple, but innovative technology clearly demonstrates the power of access to open-data.

Here is a good presentation by Flip Kromer on the importance of open-data in government. He runs a site, infochimps.org that tries to offer all the public data sets available. He gives a good rundown of the challenges and benefits of organizing public data.