Looking Back on 2010

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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:

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.