The Labs is preparing for a sold out TransparencyCamp (Feb 28, Mar 1). Meanwhile, interesting tidbits continue. Here’s what happened this past week at Sunlight Labs…

48 Hour Open Govt Hack-a-thon Announced. Labs Developer James Turk is attending PyCon in Chicago at end of March (Mar 29 – 31) where Sunlight Labs will be hosting a 48 hour Hackathon. Great chance for developers to talk to people at the Labs.

Our Open Govt List – OOGL! Sunlight is gathering ideas/votes for the most important elements to tell Obama and the new CTO (whoever she may be) to add to the planned Transparency/Open Government Directive. #microtask: Vote or add yours.

NYTIMES Open Developer Day. NYTimes has been doing some incredible work opening up their own API. Labs Director Clay Johnson attended their Developer Day in NYC last Friday.

Cookies, Analytics, and Government. Center for Democracy and Technology and Sunlight co-hosted a group discussion on revising the Federal’s government persistent cookie policy as it (mostly) pertained to web analytic data. Clay Johnson and Greg Elin attended. Conclusions: Policy needs revising (duh). Everyone are ready to revise (yea!). Next: defining a “safe-harbor” of practices where web managers/developers can implement without head of agency waivers.

Learning about Map/Reduce Labs Developers Garret Schure and Jeremy Carbaugh attended Hadoop training in California — an important new skill set. Anyone out there a Hadoop expert or map/reduce expert eager to apply that expertise to government information?

Evangelizing Data Sharing. Ever evangelizing, Greg Elin visited the Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis to encourage them to get more of their data and economic models online.

Link Round Up.
Recovery.gov gets some content •
Stimulus Watch launched by Jerry Brito after Eileen Norcross •
Interesting list of Federal blogs

Labs Tweet of the Week: @jroo tweeted: “useful python methods for dealing with congressional data: http://gist.github.com/jroo/“