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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.

The Sunlight Foundation, in partnership with Google, Mozilla and Redhat, today announced a nation-wide weekend hackathon dedicated to coding projects that foster government transparency. Scheduled for December 12th and 13th and titled The Great American Hackathon, the network of events could lead to some really cool developments. Sunlight has some specific suggestions for projects developers might work on (see below) and lots of the unexpected is expected as well.

You can help make it happen by signing up to host an event in your town. At least a few awesome things ought to come out of it. Check out the list of what's been proposed so far.

Want to see who got part of the hundreds of billions of dollars in Recovery.gov funds near you? Now you can point your iPhone 3Gs or Android phone in any direction and see the closest recipients, thanks to the publication of the official data set onto the Layar Augmented Reality platform. Sunlight Labs published the marked-up information and the results are fascinating.

This may be the most accessible way to view this information yet. I must confess, I am surprised to see that an auto shop and a Bible college in my neighborhood received a lot more money than the technical college, eco-car company and Native American youth program down the road. Fire up Layar on your phone, search for "Sunlight" and you can see the effects of the funding program on your own neighborhood. This is the kind of thing that standardized data makes possible.

If you're a lobbyist / advocate, conspiracy theorist or Freakonomics fan, then you'll love DataMasher. The map-based mash up site just took the Sunlight Foundation's $10,000 grand prize in the Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge. DataMasher offers users with no programming experience a chance to compare government data sets on a state-by-state basis. The tool is just one of the 3rd party mash ups using Data.gov's federal government information.

In its fifth year, Google's Summer of Code continues to usher advanced education students into the open source environment. For a three-month period, 150 open source projects benefit from the work of 1000 students and 2000 mentors. Some of the organizations involved include Creative Commons, Drupal and the Sunlight Foundation.

More than 70 major companies, academic institutions and high profile technologists have launched a campaign to educate US government agencies about the benefits of open source technology. Announced earlier at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, groups such as Google, RedHat, Novell, Linux, Mozilla, Sun Microsystems and the Electronic Frontiers Foundation have teamed up to create Open Source For America. The joint effort is a coalition aimed at lobbying the US Federal government to consider using open-source software over proprietary code. O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly and Executive Director of the Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin are just some of the board advisors.