Martin and I are just coming back from Foo Camp, O’Reilly’s unconference in Sebastopol, CA. Folks there loved Many Eyes and were excited to see all the different ways in which people are using visualization on the site - in fact, they’ve started asking us for new features already!

The Foo crowd is always highly charged and stimulating so we thought we’d share one of the highlights of this year’s event with you: the session on Liberate Government Info, organized by Carl Malamud (data activist who, among other things, put the SEC’s EDGAR database online). Here at VCL we have been talking about the importance of making public data more easily available for ages, so it was great to see that one of the best-attended sessions at Foo was about opening up data.

The discussion touched on legal issues (which data sets are OK to be scraped? The language around public data sources isn’t always clear), technical challenges (how to make data scraping and storage more accessible to non-hacker citizens) to accounts of current open data projects (there was a definite political focus to several of the projects while others touched on crime rates, urban planning alerts, internet archiving, transit patterns, sales taxes, and other topics).

Have you ever worked on an open-data project? Do you have experience with public data sets? We’d love to hear your thoughts–leave a comment if you have ideas or would like to get involved.