ReadWriteWeb

The Sunlight Foundation's Sunlight Labs made its Real Time Congress API available today. "The Real Time Congress API (RTC) is a RESTful API over the artifacts of Congress, kept up to date in as close to real time as possible," the announcement says. Data is available in both JSON and XML.

StreamCongress is already using the new API to stream floor updates.

We've been on something of a contest kick here, so let's continue the trend. The World Bank is sponsoring the $15,000 Apps for Development contest. The World Bank launched its Open Data Initiative in April, 2010 and it's offering cash prizes to the developers who can make best use of the data.

The World Bank has been harshly criticized by non-governmental organizations, but this could be a good opportunity to for developers with ideas to do some good while making some money.

We noted last year, that many believe U.S. President Obama's push for governmental transparency has been a failure. Whether that's true, the overall tendency toward access continues to gather momentum.

The U.S. House of Representatives has announced a public hearing to explore making publicly-funded research open to the public. Legislators in both the House and the Senate have already introduced bills calling for this. If they pass, the implications could be significant and might result in an economic jump.

The State of California will hold an application development contest this summer, according to O'Reilly Radar, and the state is partnering with Google, Microsoft, ProgrammableWeb, and IdeaScale to make it happen. ProgrammableWeb's site for the contest will be live later today.

Update: The Apps for California site is now live. See also Programmable Web's blog post about the effort.

It was a few years ago that the World Internet Project stated that "broadband changes everything." The next evolution of the Web no doubt is largely being driven by the amazing user experience and functionality delivered by the iPhone and other smartphones. iPhone applications are no longer just toys for techies! This week we looked at examples of health and fitness iPhone apps, and 2010 Winter Olympics iPhone apps. Today we check out what's being delivered by government.

The government cloud computing service rumored since late July is here, and companies are jumping at the chance to join Apps.gov, an "online storefront" for cloud services and applications pre-approved for use by federal agencies. According to the post by U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, Apps.gov will move at the same cautious pace Data.gov has, and currently the site is pretty bare bones. Certain areas are without any vendors and all but those related to social media are dominated by Salesforce.com and Google. Other big players, such as Amazon Web Services, are also looking to cash in by becoming a part of the site.

The US Federal Government has plans to offer both Software as a Service for government agencies and a cloud-based platform for agencies to develop, test and deploy new applications. Those programs could be announced at the Gov 2.0 Summit in September, according to a report this morning from Federal News Radio.

SaaS offerings made available will be government-approved services like email, productivity apps, document management and business process management software. Those services are intended for use by other government agencies. Even more exciting may be the application platform that's part of the plan.

"So that government information is accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people, I have asked Sir Tim Berners-Lee who led the creation of the world wide web, to help us drive the opening up of access to Government data in the web over the coming month." Can't you picture Barack Obama making that statement? He didn't though; that was the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a statement about electoral reform, according to a report from Charles Arthur of the Guardian.

Berners-Lee, a man whose invention of the web has had a greater impact on humanity than all but a handful of inventions over the last 50 years, is now one of the world's leading advocates not just for government data on the web but for free public access to raw bulk data that anyone can process for analysis and mashups. While the new Obama administration has made big promises about open government, it may now quickly find itself falling behind the UK.

The long awaited catalog of public data from the US government launched this morning at Data.gov. Developers, watchdogs and data nerds around the world rejoiced - but the initial offering is a bit of a let down.

New federal CIO Vivek Kundra is in charge of the site, which will act as a central repository for government data, including XML, CSV, KML files and more. At launch a mere 47 data sets are included and they appear to lean towards the least controversial matters. None the less, it's exciting to see the effort happening. Hopefully some awesome mashups are on the way!

Vancouver, BC's city government posted an agenda for next week's council meeting that outlines its interest in adopting open data, open standards and open source software for all of its data and information resources. Vancouver hopes this new policy will help create new opportunities for its city, recently named "Best City Archive of the World".