Two years ago we held an Open Government Sprint at PyCon 2009. We had never hosted an event like that before, and had no idea what to expect. To our amazement we ended up with one of the largest groups of any of the sprint projects, completely filling our room for the first few days. Approximately 30 people attended and kicked off what has now become the Open State Project.

Next week, we’ll be heading to PyCon and hosting an Open Government Hackathon for the third year in a row. The primary focus will again be the Open State Project but our space is open to everyone interested in government data. If you have a project you’d like to hack on let us know and I’ll be sure to mention your project when I plug the sprint. If you aren’t attending PyCon but happen to be near Atlanta you’re welcome to join too, the Hackathon is free and open to the public (March 14th-16th @ the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta).

Additionally, I’m going to be presenting a poster on the technical aspects of the Open State Project on Sunday. I’ll be around to talk about the project itself but also web scraping and opening government data in general, so if you’re at PyCon stop by during the poster session Sunday morning and say hi.