The Sunlight Foundation aims to use the internet to help make government—especially lawmaking—more transparent. To this end, they’ve funded projects that get legislation and financial records online. These projects typically release APIs to let independent developers expand on their work.
Sunlight has been on a tear. In the past few months they've—
- Brought openness advocates, developers and government folks together to discuss how to open up government data
- Launched a project to get every state’s legislative data into mashup-worthy formats
- Invited developers to PyCon and Web2.0 Expo, and gave them a space to pull up a chair and get to work on that project
- Inspired 45 developers to create mashups for Apps for America, a competition to use Sunlight’s APIs to shed light on congressional activity
This last stat is most impressive to me. That’s 45 teams who have devoted time building working apps. So many that Sunlight has extended their judging for an extra week to handle the load.
Here at the Case Foundation, we got a taste of this sort of grantmaking when we funded a challenge at NetSquared last year, and it isn’t easy.
Apps for America shows how much a worthy problem and a little bit of prize money can do—given the right APIs. From the beginning, the Sunlight Foundation projects have focused on getting data into API form in the first place. Good to see them now building a community around this work.
To Ellen, Clay and all the other Sunlighters, good luck with your review of these projects. Use your extra week well!
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