This afternoon, a friend of mine tweeted "Don't Click: "

I, being a naturally curious human being, proceeded to click the button and saw a page with another button that says "Don't Click"

I clicked on that button as well and then noticed that in my Twitter feed, I had in fact tweeted the same link even though I never consented to do so.

Huzzah! the first twitter social virus!

It seems mostly harmless, just perpetuating itself and breeding. You can check out the graph of its use here:

Here's how it works:

More evidence of The Sunlight Foundation's pursuing its catalyst mission—using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency—at the Sunlight Labs. Catalysts initiate reactions that precipitate the desired solution. Here's what happened this past week at Sunlight Labs...

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.

Stimulus stimulus stimulus, all we're hearing about is the stimulus packages these days. Everyone in our field is figuring out different ways to parse bills, reports and other such things while we wait on Recovery.gov to launch. Whether it is Stimulus Watch, Read the Stimulus, or even Pew's Subsidy Scope (for which we are providing technical assistance), it seems like everybody is trying to parse and find data related to either bailouts or the stimulus packages.

We've started a wiki page to track what everybody is up to. Please add your own project here so people can check it out!

A note: to limit spam on our wiki, we require you to register before you can edit pages.

"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

The Republicans in Congress have launched a new GOP.gov which includes an API. While a commendable effort it leaves a lot to be desired but could serve to pave a path towards an official congressional API.

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...