Fousquare, a location based application for smart phones, has been growing in popularity at an exponential rate. In 2010 the service grew by 3400% with over 380,000,000 check-ins worldwide. The service uses game mechanics to entice users to check into locations, leave tips, comments and reviews and to find nearby friends.

One of the more useful features on Foursquare is that each location includes a "Tips" section.  When viewing a location, either on the website or through the mobile application, you can see tips -- todos, fun facts, and other brief notes and links -- left by previous visitors. These notes can then be sorted by date or popularity, and also hold great potential as an interesting educational tool. By allowing users and organizations like Sunlight to connect certain facts relevant to politics and politicians with certain locations, Foursquare becomes an innovative way for folks to inform and say informed on transparency issues. Here's how:

As Foursquare becomes more popular, more people will begin to "check into" the offices of politicians and at political hotspots from all over the country. In fact, right now, you can check into the office of Speaker John Bohner. To tap into this tool's educational potential, after you check into Rep. Bohner's office (while visiting), you can easily take a moment to leave a tip on his Foursquare page with information about his biggest donors or related information from his OpenCongress page.

People who check in at his office after you will now have a quick link to review this data before they meet with anyone from his office. The Capitol Hill Club is a popular fundraising spot, and noting that in the tips section on their Foursquare page will alert visitors to past fundraisers held there.

These tips aren't just useful at the national level. For instance, if you happen to check into the Wisconsin State Capitol Building, you might find information on Senate Republican Leader Scott Fitzgerald useful.

Want some great resources to help you leave savvy tips? Here are a few we suggest:

• Influence Explorer
• OpenCongress
• OpenGovernment
• OpenSecrets
• Political Party Time

Please keep in mind that the point of Tips is to make helpful information available to future visitors, so make your comments constructive. (Information (not jerkiness) is power.) Also, not all political offices and spaces have been logged into Foursquare yet. If you find that to be the case, why not add them yourself and share a useful tip while you're at it?

A large contingent of Sunlighters are heading to Austin this week for Netroots Nation, the 3rd annual gathering of Kos bloggers and others in the progressive blogosphere (that used to be called Yearly Kos). (Get ready for all of the #nn08 hashtag tweets!)

Try to connect with us if you are there. You can find us in the exhibit hall (along with folks from the Center for Responsive Politics,  National Institute on Money in State Politics and OpenCongress.org. We'll be right up front, across from MAPLight.org's booth, so you can't miss us.

Sunlight colleagues are on a number of panels. Start your Friday morning off with one that is chaired by Sunlight consultant Micah Sifry, as he and his panelists discuss how the next administration can leverage the Web and the participatory transparent culture that goes along with it, to make our government work better.

That panel should inspire you to help improve our government. Join Sunlight's John Wonderlich to find out how. He and OpenLeft blogger Matt Stoller will give you the scoop on the future of advocacy and what political influence should look like in a networked social environment. Their panel, "Lobbying Congress: Advocacy and Digital Empowerment" will be held on Saturday@ 1:30 p.m.

Right after that panel, come learn more about how to use the sites created by our ‘transparency posse' during our workshop, "Insanely Useful Tools You Can Use to Keep Track of Congress and State Lawmakers" on Saturday @ 3pm. This will be moderated by Sunlighter, Paul Blumenthal.

While you're in Austin, you might want to test how your political trivia smarts compare to Paul's during a "Pub Quiz" organized by Dkos front pager AdamB to be held during Happy Hour on Friday at the local Champions Sports Bar. (Stop by our booth for more details.) Make sure to "study" beforehand by playing our new PoliQuiz game. We'll release all of our answers in API format so they can be mashed up with relevant data. What else would you expect?!

See you in Austin!