Sunlight Foundation

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Purpose of Organization

Taken from their website:

The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. We are unique in that technology and the power of the Internet are at the core of every one of our efforts.

Our initial projects – from the establishment of a [Congresspedia], the making of “transparency grants” for the development and enhancement of databases and websites, and two separate efforts to engage the public in distributed journalism and offer online tutorials on the role of money in politics efforts – are based on the premise that the collective power of citizens to demand greater accountability is the clearest route to reform.

Sunlight’s work is committed to helping citizens, journalists and bloggers be their own best watchdogs, both by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and websites to enable all of us to pool our intelligence in new, and yet to be imagined, ways.

Profile

"All this data about Obama, and any other Senator, can be found on OpenCongress.org, a project quarterbacked by the Sunlight Foundation based in Washington. Consider Sunlight a political journalist’s best friend – it tracks fundraising events for politicians, displays the status of bills, follows voting records of all lawmakers, lists lobbying disclosure records, posts schedules of participating legislators and investigates how earmarks are being used. If that weren’t enough, the Sunlight Foundation also awards grants to Web 2.0 organizations trying to make information about Congress and the federal government more accessible to Americans.

OpenCongress.org is just one of many projects under the Sunlight Umbrella. On PublicMarkup.org, you can check out bills in their entirety, such as the recent whopper Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. Check out Fortune535 if you want to find lawmakers’ net worth (McCain was worth $36 million, Sen. Kennedy was at $102 million). And the latest website, FARAdb, gives you the ability to see how much lobbyists contribute to legislators. For example, it might be interesting to see how former White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart gave $2,100 to Sen. Hillary Clinton on Sept. 27, 2006. This database can hone in on the exact date, lobbyist group, donor and legislator receiving the money.

Why is the Sunlight Foundation pouring its efforts into government transparency? ”More people are going online not just to shop and book airplane tickets,” says Gabriela Schneider, communications director at the Sunlight Foundation. “They want to share ideas on how they want democracy to work. And we have collaborative projects to engage people on opening up access to government.”

Aggregating all that mountainous information on legislators requires separate websites set up by Sunlight staff. One site might look at earmarks, and another might list daily schedules of Congressmen. It’s all about giving control back to the American people, whether they are merely viewers or active citizen journalists. “We want to empower citizens to know as much about their government in order to better engaged in the political process,” Schneider notes.

When it comes to citizen media, Schneider points to Congresspedia as a project ideal for adventurous political writers. The site allows contributors to edit information on Congress representatives or candidates to Congress, sharing information in a true Wikipedia style. One of its more successful initiatives was its super delegate project, offering details about those mysterious delegates made popular during the primaries. Anyone who had intimate knowledge of the delegates were encouraged to contribute, and Schneider says the mainstream media often sourced Congresspedia for super-delegate information.

The Sunlight Foundation also led a research project amassing 3,000 citizen journalists to research earmarks occurring in their community. “It’s fascinating to watch a citizen journalist find that needle in the haystack to make government more responsible,” Schneider says.

But don’t think Congress is stiff-arming Sunlight. Schneider says many members of Congress work with Sunlight in order to release proper documents and financial info to aid in the mission of transparency. The Foundation is digitizing data that usually resides in file folders in Washington, allowing everyday citizens to peek under the hood of the Capitol Building to see all the deals that go down hourly.

The Sunlight Foundation kept busy during the financial bailout chaos. Its Party Time project discovered that more than 250 parties were thrown for members of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee this year, hosted by players in the finance and real estate industries. Nancy Watzman, director of the Party Time project, said in a release: “The very lawmakers in Congress who are making the decisions about the most massive proposed bailout of industry in history are those who have been wined, dined, and sushi-ed by lobbyists the financial sector.”

Less well-known Web initiatives trying to open up government information can get some help from Sunlight’s “transparency” grants, Schneider tells DigitalJournal.com. Every year, the Foundation awards grants ranging from $1,000 to $800,000. In 2008, the Foundation awarded $5,000 to Knowledge as Power, a website dedicated to creating a legislator email management system. Around $90,000 went to MAPlight.org, a group linking connections between campaign donation and legislative votes.

Americans who like their government transparent would be smart to enjoy what the Sunlight Foundation has created: grassroots websites dedicated to opening doors that have remained shut too long. Watchdogs like Sunlight can also be the ideal bookmark for citizen journalists hunting for that under-reported political story." (http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/260949)

Transparency Grants from the Foundation

Taken from their site:

The Sunlight Foundation offers “transparency grants” for organizations that are using new “Web 2.0” technology to further the organization’s mission of making information about Congress and the federal government more accessible to the American people. Our goal is to support groups and individuals who are going beyond the traditional, single subject public disclosure database, and who are interested in creating cutting-edge tools to enable the media, bloggers and citizens to sift, share and combine government information in ways that are useful for them.

Through its projects and grant-making, Sunlight serves as a catalyst to create greater political transparency and to foster more openness and accountability in government. To apply for a grant from the Sunlight Foundation, contact us for guidelines.

Major Transparency Grants

  • $100,000 to Capitol News Connection (http://www2.pri.org/cncnews/): to fund an interactive widget that will allow citizens, via public radio stations’ Web sites throughout the country, to ask lawmakers specific questions and get responses
  • $25,000 to Center for Citizen Media (http://citmedia.org): to develop an Election Year Demonstration Project Web site to cover everything that can be reported on a congressional election, with an emphasis on drawing on the talents and ideas of local citizen journalists
  • $55,000 to Center for Democracy and Technology (http://www.cdt.org): to support its OpenCRS project (http://www.opencrs.com) which harnesses the power of the Internet to promote the distribution of Congressional Research Service reports to the public
  • $100,000 to Center for Independent Media (http://www.newjournalist.org): to support an effort to establish a national branch of its New Journalist Program in Washington, DC for training of political news bloggers who will cover Congress, federal agencies, the presidency, Supreme Court and the influence of lobbying, the national press corps and campaign finance
  • $235,000 to Center for Media and Democracy (http://www.prwatch.org): to continue investment in the joint Sunlight Foundation/Center for Media and Democracy wiki on Congress – Congresspedia
  • $117,000 to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (http://www.citizensforethics.org): to fund the launch of its Open Community Open Document Review System, which provides an online review process that enables people across the Internet to review, tag, comment on and rate the importance of government documents received by CREW through Freedom of Information Act requests
  • $325,090 to Center for Responsive Politics (http://opensecrets.org): to create databases on lobbyists, 527s, personal financial disclosures and travel, and to expand its campaign finance databases
  • $384,713 to The Focus Project’s OMB Watch (http://www.ombwatch.org): Grants to OMB Watch support a project to define a proactive agenda to modernize and increase public disclosure of government information and the organization’s Fedspending.org Web site. This project combines data from the Federal Procurement Data System and the Federal Assistance Award Data System to create a free, searchable database of federal government contracting and spending
  • $277,000 to MAPLight.org (http://www.maplight.org) to provide core funding to support the organization’s newly launched Web 2.0 federal search engine that interactively exposes the links between dollars donated by interested parties and congressional votes
  • $157,000 to Metavid (http://metavid.ucsc.edu): to create an open, online platform that contains a video archive of public domain U.S. House and Senate proceedings built completely on open source tools
  • $50,000 to the National Institute on Money in State Politics (http://www.followthemoney.org): to support the development and implementation of several APIs so programmers can access and display in their own applications the Institute’s data on campaign contributions to political campaigns at the state level
  • $10,000 to NewAssignment.Net (http://newassignment.net): to support its launch and work to spur journalistic innovation by grouping veteran journalists and passionate amateurs in online, collaborative reporting efforts
  • $10,000 to NewsTrust.net (http://www.newstrust.net): to support its work to harness social wisdom to aggregate and highlight quality online journalism about elected representatives, with a focus on accountability, corruption and transparency in Congress
  • $10,000 to The Project on Government Oversight (http://www.pogo.org): a one-time grant supported its investigative reporting and blogging on the “revolving door” between the government and the private sector.
  • $25,000 to People for the American Way’s Young Elected Officials Network (http://www.pfaw.org): to support a track on government transparency and accountability at its Young Elected Officials Network annual training and networking conference
  • $200,000 to ReadtheBill.org (http://readthebill.org): to provide initial funding for the public educations efforts of this new organization, the leading advocate for open floor deliberations in the U.S. Congress, to require legislation and conference reports to be posted on the Internet for 72 hours before floor consideration
  • $35,000 to Room Eight (http://www.r8ny.com): a grant to this blog, which covers New York politics, supported the expansion of its nonpartisan coverage of the 29 New York congressional members, including their legislative and budgetary activities and earmarks
  • $22,000 to Taxpayers for Common Sense (http://www.taxpayer.net): to enable the organization to develop a comprehensive plan to integrate and advance the use of the Internet and related technologies into their overall work.

Mini-grants

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis with reviews every three months. To date, our mini-grants have supported:

  • $1,600 to Arizona Congress Watch (http://azcongresswatch.com): for the acquisition of polling data and a clipping service to support its work to report on the activities of the Arizona congressional delegation
  • $2,500 to BluegrassReport.org (http://www.bluegrassreport.org): to fund software upgrades that power its Web site, which educates voters as it highlights the issues of political corruption and transparency in government, particularly in Kentucky
  • $1,600 to Connecticut Local Politics (http://www.ctlocalpolitics.net): for the acquisition of polling data, a video camera and the cost of Web hosting for this nonpartisan, not-for profit blog that covers Connecticut politics from town halls to the state’s delegation in the U.S. Congress
  • $4,500 to More Perfect (http://www.moreperfect.org): to support its development of a wiki designed to involve the public in creating and collaborating on laws and policy
  • $5,000 to OpEdNews (http://www.opednews.com): to create a volunteer moderated Web site system that aggregates news articles, blog coverage and links to Congresspedia articles for every member of Congress
  • $5,000 to WashingtonWatch.com (http://www.washingtonwatch.com): to support its outreach and efforts to determine the average cost, or savings, per individual of each bill introduced in Congress by performing calculations on government estimates compared to the US population


More Information

  1. Open Congress
  2. Public Markup