http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/03/truly-open-data.html
“I’m kicking myself because I’ve been taking far too narrow an interpretation of “an open source approach”. I’ve been focused on getting people to release data. That’s the data analogue of tossing code over the wall, and we know it takes more than a tarball on an FTP server to get the benefits of open source. The same is true of data.”
Personally I’ve found talking to governments to be a big time sink at best.
At the ESRI User Conference, I had huge cooperation from an Indian tribe rep in Idaho. And a few other government reps (usually at the county level) practically thrust their data upon me. There’s definitely some government folks who are good to talk to. My feeling is to work with the ones that are cooperative, and let the rest go hang.