OpenGovernment is a great idea and I wish the team building it all of the best. OpenGovernment will be the only competitor so far to a startup I've been working on the past 3 years: http://www.openpoll.us. It's exciting to see other people prove your idea is a good one. That being said, I think a release of OpenGovernment with only 5 states is a little premature.(I'm waiting to have all states complete before releasing my MVP.) I am very interested in seeing what they come up with.
If you heard of a website launch with partial data without your state, how often would you go back to check if your state was added? My opinion is that users would initially see the site, and not visit again for a few months. You have a larger target-able market by waiting.
The truth is they have a lot more than 5 states in github. They could have probably gotten away with launching 20 or 25 states.
