Much of my research these days is taken up with activities associated with the SSHRC Partnership Grant project, How the geospatial web 2.0 is reshaping government-citizen interactions, that is lead by Prof. Renee Sieber at McGill University. Part of my work with this project investigates the extent to which claims of an open government data mediated transformation in government-citizen relations stand up to empirical scrutiny. The emerging findings directly confront the historical amnesia about expectations for the democratic, economic, political, and social virtues of previous information and communication technologies that seemingly inform much fanfare associated with narratives of the supposed progressive and emancipatory powers of geospatial media and participatory social networking tools.