Knowing how your state legislator is voting - and what they're voting on - seems a fairly basic requirement for a functional democracy. Strangely enough, however, this information is often buried on state congressional websites, tied up in unsearchable PDFs or layered deep within an unnavigable subsection of the net.

The Sunlight Foundation's Open State Project has started changing all that, by parsing almost every state's available data and breaking it down into a consistent, open and usable format, allowing greater transparency and accessibility into data on votes, bill schedules, committees and more.

James Turk, the head of the Open State Project (OpenStates.org) and the Sunlight Foundation's new Boston satellite office, will explain how and why the Open State Project was conceived, what sort of feasibility testing Sunlight did, and will help explore how you can take the lessons he's learned back into your own civic or journalistic projects, from the grunt work of code scraping to energizing and coordinating an active volunteer base.

Also come and share your own projects, hacks and questions as this joint meet up of Hacks/Hackers and Boston Sunlight Foundation brainstorms what could be the next big innovation in data wrangling.

Also: The usual free cookies and coffee!

Transportation: Plenty of free parking in the Globe lot. MBTA: A quick & easy 5 min walk from the Red Line's JFK/UMass stop.