Vancouver is thinking open. A council meeting agenda calls for discussing "open data, open standards and open source software for all of its data and information resources," according to the ReadWriteWeb post linked above. The benefits of governments going open are immense and arguably fulfill the role of government in serving its people. Indeed, Open Source is, by its very nature, a form of digital democracy. According to our friends at NorthBySouth, a South American network of developers, many South American governments have made the switch to open source. This is a trend that will undoubtedly continue in North America as the goals of transparency and openness in government meet the pressure to reduce both present and future costs of ownership. Hopefully (and ideally), these factors will be eclipsed by the apparent benefits of crowd-sourced code, harnessing the hive mind of humanity to produce great ideas in the form of usable code and accessible public data.