In a talk put on by the New America Foundation today, Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked about how government policy should spur innovation, and how it can. It was good to hear Schmidt emphasize the benefits of opening up government data – and how that would lead to more technical innovation, more analysis of that data, and more citizen-driven policies coming from a better informed and more engaged populace.

We’ve been thinking a lot lately about open data, in part because of our work last week on two mapping mashups that used data released by the DC government. This work was an experiment to see what could be done with open data like this, and the result was a lot of interesting mashups that let DC residents find out a lot more about where they live, a lot easier. Beyond this recent work, we’ve also been talking about open data with a lot of our clients recently, who know that other organizations working towards a common cause could greatly benefit from having access to this data but don’t know a good way to give it to them. It’s great to see the support for open data and the common standards that come with it gathering steam, and it would be amazing if the federal government threw in their support behind this and even better participated and opened up much of their own data.

You can watch Schmidt’s entire discussion in this video.