It’s been a busy year in the Labs. In a few days we’ll filter back into the office, rested, recharged and ready to tackle 2011. But before then, let’s take a second to recall everything that happened in 2010.

I should start with the most important stuff: the people. We added a bunch of new teammates this year. Andrew, Chris, Alison, Caitlin and Aaron have all proven to be great additions to Sunlight; we’re lucky to have them. We also had some folks move around within the Labs. Ali officially became Sunlight’s Creative Director; Ethan took over the Data Commons Project; and Kevin grabbed the helm of Subsidyscope. And I stepped into Clay’s shoes partway through the year when he struck off in search of a new adventure.

We put all that new talent to good use: in 2010 we built a ton of stuff. Here are some — but by no means all — of the the things we made this year:

• The Data Commons team had already been working in 2009, and this year the results started going live: TransparencyData.com, Influence Explorer, Poligraft, Checking Influence

• The Open States Project revamped its architecture and launched its first five states (there’s more great stuff coming from this project very soon).

• The Subsidyscope team launched its work on the nonprofit and energy sectors, as well as Clearspending, the data quality study that came out of their work with USASpending.gov’s not-all-that-great data.

• Politiwidgets (and the Drumbone API powering it) made it easy to bring useful information about legislators to a variety of sites.

• The National Data Catalog not only launched, but went through a couple of iterations of improved curation tools and API methods.

• Sunlight CAM helped tackle the unprecedented flood of money in this year’s election, as did Aaron’s Follow the Unlimited Money tool.

• Kevin published ClearMaps, an incredibly small and fast Flash-based thematic mapping toolkit.

• David scraped the Catalog of Government Publications

• Josh launched our iPhone offering, and Eric added a Windows Phone 7 app to the Android app he’d published in 2009. All three continue to do great, and have collectively been downloaded over 300,000 times.

• We had some fun running Elena’s Inbox, an experiment in helping the public navigate document dumps.

• And just a few weeks ago Ali and Jeremy launched a new and improved version of the foundation site.

Phew! We also had our first Design for America contest, participated in a TransparencyCamp, built an electronic door opener, and made a bunch of Labs Olympics projects.

What’s coming in 2011? Well, we’ve got some ideas. We’re going to be working on some interesting mobile apps thanks to the support of the Knight Foundation. Our existing mobile apps will be getting some exciting new features, too. Our API offerings are going to be getting more sophisticated. The Data Commons suite of sites will continue to get richer and more powerful — so will Open States. You can expect another chance for the Labs community outside of this office to show its stuff. And I’m pretty excited about some of the natural language processing projects that we have in the works.

But I don’t want to spoil the surprise. We’re looking forward to 2011, and we hope you are, too. In the meantime, have a safe and happy holiday season. We’ll meet you back here in the new year.