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 CSPAN 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

• Sunlight Foundation
• Sunlight Labs
• Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group
• Political Party Time

Connect

• Twitter: Sunlight Network
• Twitter: Sunlight Foundation
• Twitter: Sunlight Labs
• Facebook: Sunlight Foundation
• YouTube: Sunlight Foundation

More Sunlight Foundation

• About
• History
• Press
• Board and Advisory Board
• Team
• Funding