Early on in the Presidential Transition, Change.gov, never-before-done process: Your Seat at the Table. They announced that every document that the transition team received in a meeting where there was three or more attendees would be posted online. By anybody's standards -- much less a presidential transition this was an awesome step and the Change.gov team should be commended for taking it.

That said Change.gov team is learning as they go and looking at the implementations on Change.gov is an interesting opportunity to get some new transparency technology learning opportunities for the new administration.

We've added a significant page to the wiki: "How You Can Help"

If you are wondering how you can use your skills to help make our Government more transparent, this web page is for you. It talks through how developers, designers and activists can be a part of the Sunlight Labs community and lend a hand to our efforts. Make sure to check it out.

Earlier this week the New York Times released their Congress API second politics API (following up on the release of their Campaign Finance API late last year). Here at Sunlight Labs we are always happy to see new APIs that wrap government data and there is definitely a lot to like here, although there are some things that will hopefully change to make the API more useful to the community at large.

You may have noticed, we've redesigned our site. Our awesome new designer, Ali made it and we're excited to have her as part of our team. And we're excited about the new website too. Especially those things on the right that allow us to update what we're working on via twitter.

The website isn't the only thing we're redesigning. We're also redesigning how Sunlight Labs works. We're clearly no longer the six-month pilot project we were chartered to be 31 months ago. We're now a team of great developers using technology to change the way our Congress operates and have been for quite some time. So we're long overdue for a gear-shift in the way we think about Sunlight Labs and how we work. We see three fundamental shifts in how we think about ourselves now vs. how the Labs was conceived.

reddit.com recently unveiled FeedANeed.org, an charity drive designed to connect volunteers with worthy nonprofits in need of some form of assistance from the community.

FeedANeed allows anyone to vote for worthy nonprofits and/or sign up to volunteer some chunk of their time to top vote-getting organizations. Volunteers that complete their pledged time by February 14th, 2009 will be entered into a drawing for prizes from various sponsors (from a wide variety of organizations Wired, EFF, Baconfreak, and even Sunlight Foundation).

I took a few minutes this morning to look at the technology that powers the DNC and RNC convention web sites. It is always interesting to see what technological decisions different organizations take when they are trying to accomplish similar goals.

James is finishing up a tweak to the Sunlight Labs API that allows for fairly sophisticated search for members of Congress, it isn't "published" yet but it is active so if you want to experiment you're welcome to try it out, but for now it is "unofficial".

We recently decided to launch a petition-like site that uses Twitter as the organizing method; using one of the very technologies that are impacted by Congressional Web use restrictions. We knew this had to be timely to have an impact, so the decision was made to have the Web site completed by the end of the day. That gave Kerry Mitchell, our fearless Creative Director, and I about six hours to get the site completed.

Modern baseball’s origins are something historians don’t have a good read on. If you look at the Origins of Baseball article on Wikipedia, you’ll see that we don’t know very much about where the rules came from, but it formalized somewhere around 1845 when the Knickerbocker Club of New York City began to play baseball against the New York Nine. In 1857 16 clubs finally sent delegates to a convention to standardize the rules and standardize America’s Pastime.