My Sunday column marked the start of Sunshine Week by recognizing a truly notable event: the voluntary liberation of a trove of public data by regional and county governments, done in the interests of efficiency and transparency. You can browse through it all on the MetroGIS web site called datafinder.

To get a sense of what the open data community does with all of this stuff, check out the projects that emerged from the Hennepin GeoCode event last month. One of them, an interactive map of Minneapolis vacant lots created by urban farmers, has already gone live. You can check it out below.