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Last month, open government technologists at the non-partisan Sunlight Foundation released three new Roku applications that bring audio and video from the White House, Congress and Supreme Court to television. Roku is an Internet TV appliance.

"We know Americans want the kind of immediate access to government that the Internet can provide - they're connecting with Congress on Facebook, asking President Obama questions over Twitter and can now bring Washington right into their living room using our new Sunlight Roku apps," said Gabriela Schneider, Sunlight's communications director. "We hope to prove to all branches of the federal government that they should make their work available in open formats, because Americans are, indeed, interested in knowing and engaging more with their government."

More than two years after President Obama's memorandum on his open government initiative, thousands of public authorities and organizations worldwide have embraced the main idea behind it. Opening up data and making them publicly available on the Web has been recognized as a key to fostering transparency and collaboration within public administrations and with citizens.

From census data, to cadastrial maps, everyday a new data set pop ups on the Web, as a quick glance at the #opendata hashtag on Twitter shows.

Yesterday we reported that Data.gov and several other Web-based public data outlets may be closed as a result of proposed budget cuts. The Sunlight Foundation is trying to save these sites you can learn more about that here.

But as Clive Thompson points out in an article for Wired, these public data sites were never living up to their promise or potential in the first place. "Bureaucrats still snooze atop mountains of public data, with no political imperative to release it," Thompson writes. "It's not something senators and congresspeople fret about while nursing martinis with lobbyists."

What could both save Data.gov and make it more useful? Thompson suggests that we hammer home the potential open data has for job creation.

Max Ogden is a developer living in San Francisco. He's a Code for America fellow and one of the founding developers of Couchappspora, an open source social network built with Apache CouchDB.

This is the second half of our interview. Part one can be found here. In this half we focus on Couchappspora, Ogden's open source social networking project.

Max Ogden is a developer living in San Francisco. He's a Code for America fellow and one of the founding developers of Couchappspora, an open source social network built with Apache CouchDB.

I recently talked to him about his Code for America fellowship, how he got started programming, CouchDB and much more. Tune in next week for part two of the interview.

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.

The idea of "open government" got a boost last week with the launch of OpenGovernment.org, a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. Similar to sibling project OpenCongress, which launched in 2008, OpenGovernment makes it simple for the average citizen to see inside the workings of their local and state governments.

Curious what bills are in the pipeline? Or what money is being spent where? OpenGovernment lays it all out in a clear and concise format that could help to create a more informed and participatory citizenry. Not only does OpenGovernment make it all accessible, it makes it interactive too.

Early in his administration, President Obama vowed to open up government with more interactive online initiatives like Recovery.gov. Though some called his early efforts a "significant failure," Obama has pressed on with attempts to create transparency, including a memo earlier this year calling on government agencies to use challenges and prizes to promote open government. Today, the U.S. General Services Administration announced it has picked ChallengePost as its official platform to fulfill that need.

The City Council of Portland, Oregon unanimously approved a resolution today that directs the city government to open data to outside developers and encourages adoption of open source solutions in technology procurement.

Like the creation of railroads and highways fostered economic development in the past, giving software developers access to a landscape of municipal data could be the beginning of a foundation for a new era of innovation.

In the quest to open government processes to citizens, collaboration and participation were identified as explicit goals in a presidential memo issued earlier this year.

Upon the appearance of a tenuously connected web of blogs, sites, wikis, and forums, many were excited about the refreshing availability of public channels for dialogue between ordinary Americans and policy makers when it comes to deciding what the 21st century American government will look like. On the other hand, the participation in these initiatives has been dwarfed by what one might see on ICanHasCheezburger. In spite of what could be seen as lackluster citizen response, The Open Government initiative's final drafting phase, which was to have closed already, has been extended until July 3.