The challenge of not having citizens get overly frustrated is enormous. We are overturning over a century's (and sometimes much, much longer) worth of bureaucratic culture – for some governments this movement is a wholesale assault on how they operate, their values and the trust they believe they are supposed to be carrying.

This isn't to say they are right, but it is a dramatic shift and one we need to help them figure out how to transition through – not simply berate them for not moving fast enough. Everybody is eager to cite the overly-cautious, conservative bureaucrat as a problem (and they are) but so is the citizen who won't get into somebody else's shoes, imagine the world from their perspective and help try move a system in a constructive way.

We can't see if that bargain is being respected unless the city is more transparent. Many of our cities are bogged down by bureaucracy and crippled by corruption. Transparency will help expose all this.

Progressive cities can work with techies to open data in better formats or create new data sets. That warrants a new bargain where we have to do something interesting in exchange.

Not all cities are so progressive. In those cases, we need a baseline of transparency. Minutes from council meetings, transit, infrastructure data (including roads) and council electoral district shapefiles should all be made freely available.

Finally, it should be noted that software can be copied. Geeks in your city may not have to write anything particularly novel, but get a lot of value deploying existing software. And the more cities, the more incentive there is for geeks to create globally useful software. So if we want to have a bargain with geeks, it's a global, rather than city-level bargain.