Socrata contract with local government and cities to host data, they have a number of cities and states on board. I bumped into them when I was living & working in Hawaii for an egovernment company. They started providing open data for both the state ( http://data.hawaii.gov ) & county ( https://data.honolulu.gov/ )

This is an area for which it seems like there are very few competing products, and from my experiences with it in the past it's a very easy and intuitive product for non-technical users. IIRC it can take things like Excel spreadsheets and handle all the import and arranging for them.

The ease of use was certainly a big sell for the agencies in Hawaii. They're already typically understaffed and dealing with lots of red tape, the last thing they want is to have to fight with a system to get data out. As with anything, if you make it hard for people, most won't bother.

If HN people are looking for a market to compete in, this one might be interesting :)