Approximately 20,000 people participated in the US Federal Government's Open Government Initiative, providing ideas and input on "How to Make Government More Open".   The initiative, run in three stages on three separate tools, was itself an experiment in using open, collaborative tools to collect and distill  feedback.  While reviews of the effort were mixed -- with many columnists focusing on early efforts by a fringe groups to derail the process -- governments everywhere have something to learn from the experience.

Another open government effort that has received mixed reviews is data.gov.  While off to a promising (and precedent-setting) start, the website's collection of data sets has not grown as quickly as hoped, and  lacks some key features, such as the ability to provide feedback on the data.  Sunlight Labs has announced its intention to help the government, and users of data.gov, by doing one better.

Inspired by data.gov, citizen groups in Russia and New Zealand are first off the mark in setting up their own government data listings.  Watch this space for Canadian updates.

The Open Planning Project is facilitating an Open311 Initiative, "A collaborative effort to create an open standard for 311 services".

In a great example of crowd-sourced journalism, Guardian readers are mining thousands of pages of MP expenses. Sample the discussion here.

The UK Cabinet Office has published a concise but wide-ranging survey called 'Power in the People's Hands: Learning from the World's Best Public Services' that includes several open data case studies.  While not strictly open-data related, I found the 'Entitlements' case study, where Sweden was able to cut wait times in half, profound.  A good read.