We organized and hosted Hack4Reno, which was Reno's first open data hackathon and what we discovered is that the government is listening but they are not equipp

We organized and hosted Hack4Reno, which was Reno's first open data hackathon and what we discovered is that the government is listening but they are not equipped with the knowledge or the tools to provide the information in a useful, meaningful way. If you talk to the individual departments and agencies, they all love the idea of being able to have a better handle on the information they have so that both internal and external applications and reports. Doing so would allow the departments to make better decisions and ideally make a more informed and engaged citizenry. Most of the datasets we provided for Hack4Reno were things that we found by scouring local government websites and finding random static spreadsheets and pdf documents. In some cases, we actually had data delivered to us on a burned CD or via flat files in FTP. It blew our mind since most of us were so used to consuming APIs to get real, timely data.