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In addition to a high-tech grocery cart and an augmented-reality mirror, one of the futuristic projects on display at Microsoft's TechForum event earlier this week was a research project exploring the possibilities for using a transparent LCD display in conjunction with a Kinect sensor to let people interact with virtual objects in a 3D space by moving their hands around behind the screen.

The Shared Learning Collaborative, a Gates Foundation-funded initiative, rebranded itself this week. There's a new name - inBloom, Inc. - but the mission and plans remain the same, the new non-profit insists. That mission is to build an open source, cloud-based education data infrastructure in the hopes of addressing a number of problems schools face: the lack of data interoperability between the various databases and software systems that they utilize and the merits of spending money to update outdated administrative IT (versus, say, buying instructional - or other - tech and/or versus spending money on something altogether non-tech).

As organizations like Code for America encourage government transparency and the concept of Open Data at multiple levels of government in the US, I think it's useful for us to take a look at how Open Data is handled in other countries. Given my non-existent skills in other languages and my distrust of Google Translate, I'll focus on English-speaking countries first.