The Big Easy button

Building geoinfo from the ground up is patent in this Gov2.0 presentation on citizen-focussed geoweb at the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center toward sustainability in the Big Easy:

... when you take a user-centered approach, no matter what challenges come your way, you always know where to start: who's the audience, what decisions do they need to make, what data is available to support those decisions.

Also from the ground up is Stack Exchange Area 51: a user community to foster geoknowledge on the web. Its bottom-up pragmatic approach builds a geohelp site as and if, and only if, the community demands - signups will move it from commitment to beta stage, and the content will be shaped by votes on-site.

click on image to access site

The natural resources sector has had openness and the web for well over a decade or so, a lifetime in geo computing - to name only the ones I'm familiar with in alphabetic order: British Geological Survey's Open Geoscience, Natural Resources Canada's Geobase and US Geological Survey's National Oil and Gas Assessment - yet are we not all still seeking big easy button solutions?! (button courtesy forbes.com)

So, did you want that with a map on the side? Just released US National Biological Information Infrastructure's GAP map has that!

click on image to access site, then select Land Cover Viewer

Did you want it à la carte? UK Ordnance Survey OpenData has it too!

click on image to access site

If you want them stacked like pancakes, look no further than data.guv.uk Combined Online Information System (COIN):

click on image to access site

And there could be a lot of scope to combine the last two, judging by traffic on the UK government data developpers google group (free login required). Let's see if the Local Data Panel (see blog) include all things geospatial, as say, in the OpenlyLocal hyperlocal sites:

Professor Nigel Shadbolt [...] is chairing a panel of experts to oversee the release of this local data. The Local Public Data Panel will champion the release of local public data and information sharing, accelerate progress in agreeing common standards for data released into the public sphere, and for making local public services better understood and more accessible.

For example searching near Cambridgeshire revealed a blog posting Cambridge City Council items, such as their new online planning system, which was hard to find via the official website.

click on image to access site