Sunlight Foundation

The Sunlight Foundation is a 501(c)(3) educational organization founded in January 2006 with the goal of increasing transparency in the United States Congress.The foundation encourages citizen and blogger participation by aggregating existing information and digitizing new information. It is best known for its reporting on Dennis Hastert's fraudulent real estate investmentscite news|url=http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/22/politics/main1740900.shtml|title=Speaker Hastert's Land Deal Questioned|date=2006-06-22|accessdate=2008-03-22|work=Associated Press|publisher=CBS News] .

Founding

The Sunlight Foundation was founded due to recent concerns about the influence of money and relationships, as well as a fear of corruption in the Congress. In a poll conducted in 2005, 75% of the participants said it affected how they voted in the in the 2006 general election.Fact|date=March 2008

The Foundation was launched in April 2006 with a $3.5 million contribution from co-founder Michael Klein.cite news|title=Aiming to Shed Light on Lawmakers|url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/25/AR2006042501699.html|first=Jeffrey|last=Birnbaum|date=2006-04-26|accessdate=2008-03-22|work=Washington Post] cite news|url=http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/node/488|title=New Group Sees Public Craving Ethics Reform|work=Roll Call|date=2006-04-27|first=Elysha|last=Tenenbaum|publisher=Sunlight Foundation] cite news|url=http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/press/ellen_cspan|title=Ellen Miller on C-Span's Washington Journal|work=C-SPAN|date=2006-05-22|accessdate=2008-03-21]

Projects

*"The Open House Project" facilitates study of how the House of Representatives uses the Internet in its daily operations, and lobbies to promote public access to works of the house.

*"Under the Influence" evaluates Congressional Websites to determine whether they have provided legally-required disclosures such as members' daily schedule and earmark lists.

*"Popup Politicians" is a widget that provides mouseover hyperlinks for selected politicians made for use in external websites.

*"Public Markup" is a proposed "Transparency in Government Act 2008" and a web site [http://publicmarkup.org/ PublicMARKUP.org] to allow this proposed legislation to be marked up by the public.

*"OpenCongress" is a joint project with the Participatory Politics Foundation to document Congressional activities

Grants

"For more details on this topic, see [http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/grants the full list on the Sunlight Foundation's website] ."

*$277,000 to [http://www.maplight.org MAPLight.org] for the development of a tool that tracks the impact of political contributions at the federal level, based on databases from "OpenSecrets.org" and the Library of Congress.

*$50,000 to [http://www.followthemoney.org FollowTheMoney.org] to provide a publicly accessible API for tracking the source of political contributions to executive and legislative officials in the 50 states of the union.

*$157,000 to Metavid to capture, stream and archive federal legislative proceedings for permanent reusable online access.

*$384,714 to [http://www.ombwatch.org/ OMB Watch] to create a database tracking recipients of all federal grants and contracts. It was used for the creation of [http://USASpending.gov USASpending.gov] Fact|date=March 2008.

*$927,928 to the [http://www.opensecrets.org Center For Responsive Politics] for the expansion of its contributions to "OpenSecrets.org". The data includes
**Federal campaign contributions
**PACs
**527 groups
**Lobbyist expenditures and activities
**Annual congressional financial disclosures
**Revolving door cases

unlight Network

The Sunlight Network is the advocacy branch of the Sunlight Foundation.

External links

* [http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/ The Sunlight Foundation]
* [http://www.sunlightnetwork.com/ The Sunlight Network]
* [http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Congresspedia Congresspedia]
* [http://www.theopenhouseproject.com The Open House Project]
* [http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/blog/13 Under the Influence]
* [http://www.sunlightlabs.com/popuppoliticians/ Popup Politicians]

References