Clearly this is a community that wants to collaborate

There were some great speakers today at the Collaborative Management conference hosted and attended by Government of Canada employees. Great turnout and some good panel discussions made for an interesting day. In case the sentiment hasn't yet completely saturated the cultural sphere, the keywords for the future are openness and collaboration. GCpedia (which is only available to federal employees) is a great forum for having these conversations, and its more than 19000 active users are showing auspicious signs of getting the party started. But there's something about getting together in person which spices up those cyber-discussions that have been in the works for weeks or even months online. The Canadian government's CIO gave a presentation in which she confirmed that Canada has an open data project in the works, it is moving forward ambitiously, and the first datasets should be ready to go online within the coming year. In the meantime, you can check out this citizen-led effort to aggregate and share datasets from various Canadian government departments. Communities of practice FTW.