Once a week here at Sunlight Labs we sit down for lunch to talk about new things we’ve learned, fun stuff we’re playing with and anything else that we find interesting. It’s always a highlight of the week and we want to share with you what we’re discussing.

So here it is, a link dump of the things that were mentioned at this week’s Labs Lunch, in no particular order. Some of what we link to is new, some old, but all were worthy of a mention. If you find it useful, let us know and we’ll keep trying to keep you posted on what we’re talking about.

Enjoy!

• Knight News Challenge: a media innovation contest that aims to advance the future of news.
• ScraperWiki: a website where people can write and repair public web scrapers and invent uses for the data.
• DBpedia: a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web.
• National Council of State Legislatures: bipartisan organization that serves the legislators and staffs of the nation’s states and territories.
• Open Source Your Rave with OpenLase
• Cars are fun.
• Fireworks is useful for wireframing.
• Stargate SG-1 gets weird towards the end of Season 4.
• 1/20 Brookings Event on Redistricting
• Public Mapping Project seeks to change this power balance by making it possible for the public to draw the boundaries of their communities and to generate redistricting plans for their state and localities.
• FAB LAB DC “Give ordinary people the right tools, and they will design and build the most extraordinary things. That’s the idea behind Fab Lab”
• DevHouseDC is this weekend! It’s an open-to-public all-day gathering of passionate geeks, hackers and makers working on whatever they want.
• Faux is a Javascript utility for building Single Page Interface (or “SPI”) applications.
• Knockout: Simplify dynamic JavaScript UIs by applying the Model-View-View Model
• pushState() JavaScript method.
• DC Legislation
• Python Profilers
• The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires