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.

Sunlight Labs contributor "wubbahead" comes up with an ingenious and automated way to find out whether or not your representative has an RSS feed by using the Sunlight Labs API the Google AJAX Feed API and some JavaScript. Make sure to check it out

Short answer: we're trying to do some interesting things with it and we may need your help. Originally, we thought "hey, let's put this into Public Markup" but unfortunately the bill's complexity actually was incompatible with Public Markup's data model. At the end of the day, the relevant parts of the bill wouldn't have fit into the commenting/displaying architecture we've used for bills in the past.

The Citizen's Briefing Book is an interesting little participatory function on change.gov, too. You can get a good read for what people are concerned about by looking at the number of ideas per category.

Just a simple little ditty thanks to IBM's ManyEyes.

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?

Following up on yesterday's post where Opened up Change.gov I just took the titles of all the documents and ran them through Wordle, removing some of the blatantly noisy words (Recommendation, Transition, Policy). Here's what we got, which may be a pretty nice way of seeing what people "at the table" are talking about.

Here's the big version

After my post yesterday about Change.gov's Your Seat at the Table feature, it got us thinking: what if this website disappears on January 21st? What if all this data goes away?

I posted (half seriously) on our Yammer account about 3 hours ago "Big gold star to anyone who can scrape and capture every 'your seat at the table' document in a Sunlight repository. I'm getting nervous that change.gov is going to disappear in a week."

James and Jeremy independently took up the challenge. And now, three hours later we have our repository. We thought we'd share the code for you to do it too if you'd like, and also this handy csv file of all of the documents.