Open States recently reached the 40 state milestone (not counting DC and Puerto Rico) and at our current pace we’ll reach our goal of all 50 states by sometime early next year. It is only due to the fantastic support of our community and indviduals who have showed up at hackathons or just started contributing on their own that this goal is now in sight.

I thought it might be fun to look back on how the project has grown, and luckily gource is a piece of software for visualizing the history of a repository can help do just that. Watch below to enjoy a visually stimulating look back through the last two and half years of commits to Open States. You’ll see flurries of activity around our hackathons, the drastic increase in activity from 2009 to 2010 and how 2011 so far takes up more than half the video, and some of the big refactors that we’ve made along the way to scale the project to a size well beyond what we initially conceived of.

(Music: “Wavy Glass” by Podington Bear], thanks to Tiina for her assistance)