I suggested the City of Chicago use Github because it is the only place to put open data that both (a) allows contributions back to the dataset (pull requests)

I suggested the City of Chicago use Github because it is the only place to put open data that both (a) allows contributions back to the dataset (pull requests) and (b) allows for community feedback (issues and comments). It's by no means ideal (the building footprints dataset is hidden behind a 2GB compressed JSON blob) but it's still useful and a step in the right direction. It's still aimed squarely at developers using the data, though. Asking a "normal citizen" to submit a pull request is still a pretty big ask.