There's the Vancouver example:
Vancouver opens up the city to web developers; Data collected by the city can be found online (it refers to the drinking fountain google map mash-up I posted earlier, too). The Vancouver initiative is also discussed by David Eaves,
Vancouver's Open Data Portal: Use it or Lose it. Boris (in comments) chastises Eaves for his "use it or lose it" formulation:
I think the "use it or lose it" is an incorrect framing. Use of Vancouver's open data to create new things creates new value, which adds value to the city. With mashups and "citizen coders", I'm sure there will be a handful of apps created -- I love the fact that we've got our own city to experiment with all these cool tools with.
But waggling your finger and saying "use it or lose it" is not, I think the correct approach. In most open source projects, unless there is continued economic drivers, it is very hard for a project to continue. Growing a commercial ecosystem is healthy.
It's great to see Sandy from HomeZilla here. This is an example of economic value seen by one commercial entity. How do we attract more? How do we maintain the apps that do get created?
I'd love to see a contest with prizes to motivate people to set up some usage of this data with real longevity. I think the Apps for Democracy contest in DC was a good example of this. (source)
I thought that both Eaves and Boris Mann point to the fragility of these initiatives. Just because they're out there, doesn't mean they'll get used enough and/or thrive. It takes users, and also economic drivers (as per Boris's comment).
...Meanwhile... Here's another example:
Smart Grid a Reality in Boulder, Colo. This project allows residents to monitor their energy / utilities usage:
Boulder Colorado's $100 million SmartGridCity project, which launched in May of 2008 and was the subject of an ABC news story last year, is completed, according to Xcel Energy, the company responsible for developing the system. With the smart grid system, meters and sensors send information via broadband over powerline to an operations center. Functions for customers include the ability to monitor energy usage, select when to use high-energy devices such as clothes dryers, and keep track of how much carbon the household is putting into the environment. Customers will soon be able to access a Web portal to monitor and control home energy management devices. SmartGridCity functions also include switching power through fully-automated substations; re-routing power around bottlenecked lines; detecting power outages and proactively identifying outage risks. The deployment integrated more than 20 applications, 95 new interfaces and more than 300 test cases according to a company release. Xcel Energy says it can now read customer meters remotely and have reduced power outages and false alarms. According to the company, the new smart grid warned about transformers that were ready to fail and they were replaced without loss of service.
iirc, Boulder is smaller than the CRD (i.e., Victoria-as-a-whole). Pretty cool to get this up and running.