Data.gov

I have been checking out the US Federal Government's open data site lately.  Imagine a country where citizens vote and elect a party to run the country.  Now imagine that the party decides where to spend money and one of the places they decide to spend money is in information technology and data and data warehousing and infrastructure and all sorts of other great things so they can track how the rest of your tax dollars are spent and what you got for it.  Now imagine they make that data available for free, no strings attached, to you, the citizens that paid for it.  It might not be as far off as we think.  Check out Data.gov.  This site belongs to the US of course, so it might be a while before we get a crack at something like this in Canada. (We don't even have Skype yet!)