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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.

Historical records are hard to look through casually. One solution is being explored in the case of Supreme Court justice nominee Elena Kagan's archive of emails sent while working under the Clinton administration. That body of data is now available in a Web-based interface that looks a lot like Gmail and is open to full-text search, thanks to the watchdog Sunlight Foundation.

Elena's Inbox is a thought-provoking project that could inspire future efforts to facilitate citizen evaluation of public records, and the Sunlight Foundation has open-sourced the code used to build it. As it stands, the microsite is a fun and interesting peek inside the Clinton administration's day-to-day operations. It's hard to imagine any previous political nominee facing this degree of public transparency.

The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation announced today the availability of its Real Time Congress iPhone app. The app displays an up-to-the-minute feed of updates from the House and Senate floors, Whip notices, hearings scheduled and key government documents as they are released.

Unfortunately all this information is displayed quite simply; there is as of yet no deep personalization as in Sunlight's years-old and fabulous OpenCongress project, there's no search and the app doesn't make use of the iPhone's push capabilities. It's not a bad start, but there is a lot of potential for an iPhone app to make Congressional activity a much more engaging part of peoples' day-to-day lives.

Have you got a few minutes to spare to help make government activities more transparent? Watchdog organization The Sunlight Foundation launched a new project called TransparencyCorps today. Modeled after Amazon's Mechanical Turk, the project asks visitors to perform small tasks that a human can do better than a machine. The first two tasks include summarizing congressional earmark requests in a form and uploading a photo of yourself calling for increased openness in government.

The innovative system is a pleasure to use and is being open sourced for other organizations interested in crowdsourcing similar tasks. You can honestly do something useful and important in 5 minutes or less on this site.