The City of Nanaimo has been pushing the envelope on open data and open government for a number of years now.

"At first blush the site seems normal. There is the standard video of the council meeting (queue cheesy local cable access public service announcement), but the meeting minutes underneath are actually broken down by the second and by clicking on them you can jump straight to that moment in the meeting. [...]

"Given Nanaimo’s modest size (it has 78,692 citizens) suggests they have a modest IT budget. So I asked Chris McLuckie, a City of Nanaimo public servant who worked on the project. He informed me that the system was built in-house by him and another city staff member; it uses off-the-shelf hardware and software and so cost under $2,000 and it took two weeks to code up."

How to Engage Citizens on a Municipal Website...

Update: It looks like the City of Nanaimo made the wise choice to use a comprehensive content management solition with elementCMS rather than waste their citizens' money building in house a feature-poor equivalent.

City of Vancouver's open data and information motion

“On May 21st, 2009 the City of Vancouver passed a motion that directed City Staff to begin sharing the data and information the city collects, to share this data in open standards and to place open source on an equal footing with proprietary software.

“Below is a simple version of the motion - one that could serve as a template for other cities.

“Consequently, this page is designed to be a place where interested citizens, politicians and public citizens other cities can suggest changes, propose edits, copy and repurpose the template. If your city has passed a motion that addresses open data, open standards and/or open source, let us know and we will post the motion to this website so other cities can leverage the work of others.”

open city motion v.1.1