Sunlight Foundation

If you know any Government folks, you might want to share with them CNET's Matt Assay report that open source mandates are coming to enterprises. Shouldn't Government be looking even harder into open source? We are.

"Using Yeas and Nays, a citizen can connect via phone to speak with her representatives, and the resulting shift keeps a record of the call located on the website that informed it." Uses Sunlight Labs API. Link

It was a quiet (code) week in Sunlight Labs, more a week of conversations and information sharing than production. The fact practitioners can so easily move between "producing" and "knowledge sharing" is one of the things I like about the Web and its mix of blogs and wikis and email lists and twitter, etc. Here's what happened this past week at Sunlight Labs...

The value proposition of Web 2.0 changing government is no longer debated. But your govt hacker street cred depends on understanding the real challenge is interoperability with policies and rules created for a federal government whose founders embraced the disruptive technology of their time, the printing press.

The following links are your briefing book...

You probably heard a new President was inaugurated this past week and that his first memo from the White House was about TRANSPARENCY. (Yhaaa.) We were back in our Lab coats nevertheless. Here's what happened last week at Sunlight Labs.

So much happens with Transparency Technology these days, it's a good time to start a Weekly Lab Report. Here's what happened last week at Sunlight Labs.

Labs launches Application Programmers Incentive. WIN $15,000! WIN $15,000! Make something useful—or at least interesting—with APIs from Sunlight for our Apps for America contest we officially announced this week.

Clay comments old school at FEC (aka, testifies). Who said developers are anti-social? Head Labs geek Clay Johnson testifies before FEC commissioners. Read Sunlight's filed comments.

We could take some inspiration from this video of scientists pouring very liquid concrete into an ant hill in order to preserve its structure for study. What could we "pour" into the government in order to create a representation of the structure of bureaucracy and information flows inside?