Yesterday the Martin Prosperity Institute released another installment of its Toronto Election 2010 discussion papers, this one focused on Open Data.

For citizens of any city this is a fantastic primer on what open data is, why it matters and, in the case of Toronto, why it should be an election issue in the upcoming civic election.

Full disclosure: I did sit down with the paper’s authors at the Institute – Kimberly Silk and Jacqueline Whyte Appleby – to talk about a number of the critical aspects surrounding this issue. Their depth and experience in municipal and regional issues has produced an invaluable resource. I hope citizens of cities everywhere are able to make use of it, but I also hope that citizens of Toronto use it to ask questions of the candidates for Mayor and council.

Again, you can download the report here.

For those not familiar with the Institute, you can read more about it here (excerpt below):

The Lloyd & Delphine Martin Prosperity Institute is the world’s leading think-tank on the role of sub-national factors – location, place and city-regions – in global economic prosperity. Led by Director Richard Florida , we take an integrated view of prosperity, looking beyond economic measures to include the importance of quality of place and the development of people’s creative potential.