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The future of open government is allowing seamless conversations to occur between thousands of employees and people … You can’t divorce open government from technology. Technology enables the conversation and supports the conversation. We’re finding that if we don’t stand in the way of that conversation, incredible things can happen.

will open government be able to tap into the “civic surplus” to solve big problems. That’s Clay Shirky‘s “cognitive surplus,” applied to citizens and government. For open government to succeed, conveners need to get citizens to participate

The report finds that 3 key groups or ‘layers’ were crucial to the successful introduction of open data. An influential and active civil society provided the ‘bottom up’ pressure for change through traditional advocacy and by setting up innovative websites demonstrating how open information could be used. Civil servants and state and federal administrators who saw open data as a way of improving efficiency provided the ‘middle layer’. Finally, high-level political leaders including Heads of States and Ministers provided the third layer.

It should come as no surprise to readers of Datablog that, as editor Simon Rogers puts it himself, "we are drowning in data." We suddenly find ourselves with unprecedented access to torrents of data that could be used to better society.

To help bridge the gap between socially minded organizations and do-good dataists, we started a project temporarily dubbed "Data Without Borders".