If you’re at the Where 2.0 conference tonight, stop by the ‘ignite’ talks to catch our presentation on open data.

We’ve been hearing a lot about open data in the news as a tool to increase transparency – even President Obama is talking about it. So what does open data look like? This is exactly what the Washington, DC government wanted to know before it opened up more of its data. So the DC government hosted the Apps for Democracy contest to see what people would do with the data it was making available. In this talk, I’ll share our experience of participating in the contest and working with Washington, DC’s large set of open data on projects like www.StumbleSafely.com. Then, we’ll take a look at who else is opening data right now, specifically looking at the recent announcement of FAO opening more than 140,000 miles of road data to OpenStreetMap.com, and move into a conversation on infrastructure. I’ll end the presentation with an announcement about a new large set of public domain data that recently become more accessible by moving into the cloud.

The ignite talk format is wild. It’s five minutes, 20 slides, with each advancing every 15 sections seconds.

**UPDATE: Here’s the video of Eric’s presentation.

Here are the slides: