About a week ago, Christopher Groskopf posted a question to the Sunlight Labs Google group. After completing a parser for North Dakota in the Fifty State Project he asked the question: “Has anyone addressed the parsing of federal schedules?”

Moments later, a volunteer team was created– Christopher bringing python to the table, and Chauncey Thorn bringing PHP to the table to start building a structure and data model to parse all the different schedule-related information coming out of government. Now, just 8 days later, volunteers are doing amazing things: a separate google group has been organized, source is being written, tickets are getting assigned, and community is being built, line after line, (I’m really sorry about this pun) bit by bit.

Now, it looks like they’re nearing 1000 different schedule sources being written. 8 days. Amazing work by a volunteer team. And really what we’re trying to build: communities of developers building the tools to change their government. Great, inspiring work from Christopher and Chauncey.