It would have been a great one year anniversary present to have had the Senate's electronic filing bill pass today, but we're not going to let that rain on our parade as we pause, briefly, to celebrate the one year anniversary of Sunlight's public launch. Just 12 months ago, we announced the start up of Congresspedia and the results of national polling that demonstrated -- overwhelmingly -- the public's support for greater transparency in Congress. We feel like the efforts of our first year have lifted the lid off of what is really possible. Today we marveled at the good luck of the timing of our effort because it seems like our very presence at this time has galvanized more than we ever would have dreamed possible in our first year.

If last year -- Sunlight's first year of operation -- was a little like being shot out of a cannon, it's hard to describe what the first quarter of this year has been like. Suffice it to say, we are moving at something beyond warp speed.

As a result we have some dramatic growth underway. Here's what's happening.

Our Sunlight Labs has become a core element of our work and we will dramatically expand its capacity this year. It started as an experiment in mid-2006 as a way to both support our grantees and experiment with technology ourselves. After an amazingly successful first year under the co-directorship of consultants Greg Elin and Micah Sifry, the Labs has become part of our cutting edge as our technology and software development arm, well beyond its original mandate. It's now evolving further to better support its expanded internal and external activities.

Greg Elin is becoming our consulting Chief Data Architect with responsibilities that include managing all API development with our partner organizations (a very high priority for us this year) and our own internal data products. He'll also be tackling the "names standardization" problem with other Labs staff. Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej of Personal Democracy Forum will continue in their valued role as strategic consultants to the Foundation and to the Labs.

If you're a regular visitor to our site you noticed sometime last week, on the left side of our home page, our latest widget - we've dubbed it Sunlight Seekr. It's the first step to a one click search engine that culls through multiple databases. We put it up last week to play around with it and it appears to be working just fine so today we are going public with it. At the moment it does a simple search of five data sets: our own Sunlight Foundation and Congresspedia sites, The Institute on State Money and Politics and Center for Responsive Politics sites for state and federal campaign contributions, and GovTrack.org. Type in the name of an individual, corporation, and zip code and see what pops up. (To do really in-depth searches of all these sites APIs are inevitable, but not all the sites we wanted to include have APIs yet.)