It has been about 10 days since we announced our goal to write parsers for all 50 state legislation websites. While 10 days ago we had nothing, I'm excited to report that today our github account shows substantial progress on 8 states and the District of Columbia. DC actually got two parsers-- one in Ruby and one in Python.

We've started these projects with just one function-- get_legislation that grabs all the bills of a particular state. That's the first step. We'll be grabbing votes, legislators and other things as we make progress. 8 states in 10 days is substantial progress! Great job!

To get involved and claim your state, check out our wiki page and our github project.

Thanks for all that you do!

The Sunlight Foundation's technology team is growing. Help us manage the Sunlight Labs community by becoming a developer here at Sunlight. Right now we're hiring for a few positions:

1. A developer with strong data and analytics skills for our Data Commons team
2. Two creative, well versed developers for our Tools and Engagement team
3. One more developer for our SubsidyScope team

If you've been thinking about a career-change, or if you're interested in getting into the realm of using your skills to change government, working on our tech team is a great opportunity.

I lead our team. What I'm committed to is, and what I believe my full time job is, is creating a compelling, fun work environment that keeps our team members and community engaged. What we're trying to do on our team is three-fold:

1. Build a community of volunteer sophisticated open source developers who want to change their government. We do this through things like our hackathons and our Apps for America contest.

2. Build a tech team at the Sunlight Foundation that builds great tools for citizens and journalists to better see what their government is doing, who is influencing it, and how their money is being spent.

3. Support the overall mission of the Sunlight Foundation

If you're a great developer who wants to start using their skills to make a real difference in America, this is an opportunity for you. Send in your resume and let's talk.

In our work with government data we encourage governments to develop great looking websites with fantastic APIs. But you can't have true transparency unless you go all the way down to the source giving citizens access to the raw bulk data.

The Labs is preparing for a sold out TransparencyCamp (Feb 28, Mar 1). Meanwhile, interesting tidbits continue. Here's what happened this past week at Sunlight Labs...

48 Hour Open Govt Hack-a-thon Announced. Labs Developer James Turk is attending PyCon in Chicago at end of March (Mar 29 - 31) where Sunlight Labs will be hosting a 48 hour Hackathon. Great chance for developers to talk to people at the Labs.