InSourceCode developers work on "Madison" with volunteers.

There wasn't a great deal of hacking, at least in the traditional sense, at the "first congressional hackathon." Given the general shiver that the word still evokes in many a Washingtonian in 2011, that might be for the best. The attendees gathered together in the halls of the United States House of Representatives didn't create a more interactive visualization of how laws are made or a mobile health app. As open government advocate Carl Malamud observed, the "hack" felt like something even rarer in the "Age of the App for That:"

Impressed @MattLira pulled off a truly bipartisan tech event on the hill. …

One of the Department of Energy's flagship open government initiatives, Open Energy Information (OpenEI), was on display at the recent National Science Festival. Ryan McKeel, an engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, talks about how OpenEI provides access to data, models and tools in the following clip:

OpenEI is "open" in any number of important ways, including open source and open linked data, as Debbie Brodt-Giles, the OpenEI project leader, notes in an Amazon case study (OpenEI is hosted on Amazon's Web Services platform). "Key platform software for OpenEI includes Apache, Semantic MediaWiki, MySQL, and …