Inspired by the President’s call for more open government, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts launched its data catalogue , following in the footsteps of Washington, DC New York , and elsewhere around the country (as well as cities in Canada and the UK ), to provide public access to information by and about government. What makes this exciting is not merely having transportation information available in machine-readable formats, but that professional and amateur enthusiasts can then get together, as they did last weekend , to create new software applications and data visualizations to better enable public transit riders to track arrival times for the next subway, bus, or ferry. Publishing government information online facilitates this kind of useful collaboration between government and the public that transforms dry data into the tools that improve people’s lives. (For another great example, check out what happened