I’m proud to announce that OpenGovernment.org is now live with our first five states! If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve already heard a lot about the Open States project, our effort to collect states’ legislative data in much the same way that we do at the federal level. We hope that that data will be used in a lot of different ways, but we think that OpenGov will be one of the most important. Our friends at the Participatory Politics Foundation — the same people behind OpenCongress — deserve a huge hand for making OpenGov what it is.

This is just the beginning, of course. We’re excited about working with PPF to build out both Open States and OpenGov to include more states, more tools and more useful information. But today’s launch is an important milestone.

But I’ll keep this short — I’d rather you spent your time on the site instead of reading my thoughts about it. If you’d like to hear more about our vision for the project, have a look at Ellen’s announcement post. Otherwise, head on over to OpenGovernment.org and have a look at what we hope is the future of state-level legislative transparency.