Sunlight Foundation is a Washington, DC-based 501c(3) non-profit organization founded in 2006 to focus on “making government transparent and accountable.” Its name comes from a quote by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
Sunlight was co-founded by Michael Klein and Ellen Miller. Miller serves as its executive director.
Ellen Miller GovFreshTV interview:
Ellen Miller Web 2.0 Expo interview with Tim O’Reilly:
Projects
- OpenCongress.org: Brings together official government data with news and blog coverage, social networking, public participation tools, and more. Free, open-source, not-for-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement.
- Foreign Lobbying: Foreign Lobbyist Influence Tracker, a joint project of ProPublica and Sunlight, digitizes information that representatives of foreign governments, political parties and government-controlled entities must disclose to the U.S. Justice Department when they seek to influence U.S. policy.
- Congrelate: Lets users view, sort, filter and share information about members of Congress and their districts.
- Transparency Corps: Lets anyone, anywhere have a positive impact on making our government more transparent by aggregating small actions that require human intelligence but not specialized political knowledge.
- Party Time: Documents the Congressional fundraising circuit.
- Transparency Jobs: Features jobs from both the US Federal Government and non-government organizations.
- LouisDB: The Library Of Unified Information Sources, an effort, to paraphrase Justice Louis Brandeis, to illuminate the workings of the federal government.
Sunlight Labs
Sunlight Foundation also includes Sunlight Labs, a “community of open source developers and designers dedicated to opening up our government to make it more transparent, accountable and responsible.” Sunlight Labs has an online community and a Google Group. Clay Johnson is its director.
Clay Johnson GovFreshTV interview:
Clay Johnson Gov 2.0 Radio interview:
[audio:http://www.blogtalkradio.com/gov20/2009/04/19/talkimg-gov20-with-clay-johnson.mp3]Blogs
Connect
- Twitter: Sunlight Network
- Twitter: Sunlight Foundation
- Twitter: Sunlight Labs
- Facebook: Sunlight Foundation
- YouTube: Sunlight Foundation