I think that policy review and changes will be the first step, at least at the City of Ottawa. Currently developers are not given any direction to be more "open" or "expose data", in fact they are likely encouraged to do the opposite. I think that residents will need to voice their desire or need for more openness, including what information and format are of most interest.

More openness is good. Exposing data is good. The point about format came up in the Top Task session. Somebody suggested that users want to use embeddable widgets - to choose a format that suits their task.

Laura Wesley suggested something like CDC's selection. See http://www.cdc.gov/Widgets/

The advantage of offering widgets is that CDC goes beyond openness and exposing data, and offers a choice of interface, a choice of what links are important to a user, a wide variety of widget formats, the HTML to embed them, and the webstats for each widget.