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Who We Fund

The Sunlight Foundation offers “transparency grants” for organizations that are using the Web to further our mission of making government information 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 data in ways that are useful for them.

To apply for a transparency grant from the Sunlight Foundation, contact us for guidelines. To apply for a mini-grant ($1,000-$5,000), submit a grant application.

To date, Sunlight's major transparency grants have included:

2009

  • $1,200,000 to the Center for Responsive Politics (http://opensecrets.org) to continue to maintain money-in-politics resources, and convert files to open data that would allow for free access to downloadable archives. It will also create and release new APIs and widgets.
  • $125,000 to Taxpayers for Common Sense (http://www.taxpayer.net) to support their transportation earmarks research project.
  • $1,000,000 to the National Institute on Money in State Politics (http://www.followthemoney.org) to move their data on state-level campaign finance to an open source data commons. NIMSP will also participate in Sunlight Data Commons which will include complete access to previous and current data collected on state-level political donors to candidates, political parties and ballot measure committees.
  • $89,800 to the Public Accountability Initiative for LittleSis, to support further development as well as the creation of a LittleSis API that will allow third parties to access raw data on demand.
  • $150,000 to OMB Watch(http://www.ombwatch.org) to support FedSpending.org, a project that encourages the government to improve the quality, accuracy and consistency of federal spending data that is disclosed. It will also advocate for the use of open source software in disclosing federal spending data.
  • $50,000 to Taxpayers for Common Sense (http://www.taxpayer.net) for the Subsidyscope project, an initiative that will research and investigate the federal government’s transportation subsidies.
  • $50,000 to Public.Resource.org (http://www.public.resource.org) for the Federal Register 2.0 project, which will purchase and repurpose raw data underlying the Code of Federal Regulation.
  • $63,733 to Center for Democracy and Technology (http://www.cdt.org) for continued support of its OpenCRS project.
  • $32,000 to the Columbia Journalism Review (http://www.cjr.org/) for continued support of their transparency reporting.
  • $10,000 to Code for America to get volunteer or stipended developers together with cities to tackle software, leading to greater municipal accessibility and transparency.

2008

  • $70,397 to The Focus Project's OMB Watch (http://www.ombwatch.org) to support a project that define a proactive agenda that will 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.
  • $134,177 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.
  • $41,188 to Center for Democracy and Technology (http://www.cdt.org) to support its OpenCRS project which harnesses the power of the Internet to promote the distribution of Congressional Research Service reports to the public.
  • $180,000 to MAPLight.org (http://www.maplight.org) to enable MAPLight.org to redesign its Web site to make it more user friendly, promote strategically more key money/votes stats about significant votes; develop video training and online tutorials; launch widgets of money/vote correlations; develop new "tabs" on its Web site to demonstrate "money near votes" and committee "exposure" highlights; add a sophisticated user comment system and continue its ongoing research on each bill.
  • $164,000 to Metavid (http://metavid.ucsc.edu) Metavid to continue to build and improve the infrastructure, with an increased emphasis on developing a community of more collaborators and users to the site.
  • $10,000 to Public.Resource.org (http://public.resource.org/) to support Open Government Working Group meetings, to discuss and promote open government techniques and activites using the Internet.
  • $25,000 to Mobilize.org, (http://www.mobilize.org) a youth-oriented organization, to support grants for young entrepreneurs who will develop ways to use Sunlight-funded databases and new technology to advance a "clean elections" agenda.
  • $72,600 to the Public Accountability Initiative for the further development of a prototype of online database of information on powerful American individuals and organizations called "Little Sis." Visitors can browse and search linked profile pages for current and former members of Congress, other government officials, Fortune 1000 companies and their leadership, top lobbying forms and lobbyists, etc. The profile pages integrate a wide range of public information and could certainly include information from the relevant databases that Sunlight currently funds.
  • $80,000 to CorpWatch (Tides Center) (http://www.corpwatch.org/) for its EDGAR 10-K data mashup/visualization project. The EDGAR database records U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings; this project will create an open database of relationships, with name standardization, of corporations, their subsidiaries and board members.
  • $19,000 to the National Institute on Money in State Politics (http://www.followthemoney.org/) for work, in collaboration with the Center for Responsive Politics, to create standardized identifiers and a Web site with this information, which will make the data publicly available.
  • $10,000 to Understanding Government, (http://understandinggov.org/) to support the Preventive Journalism Prize, for journalism that investigates problems before they become crises, new and effective solutions to problems and government responses to these situations.
  • $72,000 to Watchdog.net, Inc., (http://watchdog.net/) to create a site which brings government data -- like census data, lobbying disclosures, voting records and campaign disclosures -- into a single place. It is distinguished by open-sourcing its software, its data and all the products of this data.
  • $38,000 to the Columbia Journalism Review (http://www.cjr.org/) for an initiative to investigate the rollback of government transparency and expansion of secrecy, through a special issue of the magazine (January 2009), interactive online content, a public event and an agenda outlining specific steps.
  • $28,000 to OpenTheGovernment.org (Fund for Constitutional Government) (http://openthegovernment.org/) for their “Most Wanted” federal information project. It will build a site (with Sunlight) where users can contribute to a list of government data and documents that should be released online. The site both compiles information about often obscure but valuable government records and, using a Digg-like format, lets others vote on the information they would most like to see.

2007

  • $100,000 to Capitol News Connection (http://www.cncnews.org/) 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.
  • $55,000 to Center for Democracy and Technology (http://www.cdt.org): to support its (OpenCRS) project 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.
  • $140,000 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.
  • $522,838 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.
  • $75,189 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.
  • $50,000 to The Focus Project's Fueling Democracy for the 21st Century RTK Project.
  • $90,000 to MAPLight.org (http://www.maplight.org), to provide core funding to support the organization's 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.
  • $222,000 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.

2006

  • $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.
  • $95,000 to Center for Media and Democracy (http://www.prwatch.org): to invest in the joint Sunlight Foundation/Center for Media and Democracy wiki on Congress – Congresspedia.
  • $405,090 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.
  • $117,000 to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (http://www.citizensforethics.org) (CREW), 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.
  • $199,128 to The Focus Project's OMB Watch (http://www.ombwatch.org) 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.
  • $777,000 to MAPLight.org (http://www.maplight.org), then TakeBackCA.org, to provide core funding to support the organization's federal search engine that interactively exposes the links between dollars donated by interested parties and congressional votes.
  • $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.
  • $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.
  • $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.
  • $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.

Mini-grants

Applications are accepted via this form. To date, our mini-grants have supported:

2009

  • $3,000 to Swing State Project (http://www.swingstateproject.com) for the Race Tracker wiki project, a non-partisan reporting project on the new OpenCongress wiki to track who is running in each congressional district in the 2010 elections. It will also feature district-specific data on the past three presidential elections.
  • $5,000 to TweetCongress (http://tweetcongress.org/) , a non-partisan group of concerned citizens that are pushing for members of Congress to join Twitter to create a more open communication between members of Congress and the public.
  • $5,000 to WashingtonWatch.com (http://washingtonwatch.com/) to support the development of a tool for a distributed project to capture 2010 earmark requests by lawmakers in to a single database.
  • $5,000 to University of California Berkeley - School of Information to develop specific technical specifications for information services that will enable independent and effective public oversight of Recovery Act money and to rate the effectiveness of Revovery.gov web services actually provided.

2008

  • $5,000 to Knowledge As Power (http://www.knowledgeaspower.org) to support the creation of a legislator email management and constituent relations communications system to increase transparency between legislators and their constituents by organizing a more effective form of communication between the two groups. This Web mail service pairs with KAP's existing legislation-tracking service, giving legislators and their staff the tools necessary to efficiently manage incoming constituent emails and systematize corresponding responses with personalized or automated letters. Sunlight's mini-grant will support a pilot email management system for one to two congressional offices and the entire Washington State Legislature.
  • $2,000 to Utah News Aggregator to support the creation of a Web news hub service and email newsletter subscription service for bloggers, political activists, legislators, candidates and concerned citizens of Utah. This forthcoming Web site will provide citizens with a full picture of daily politics in Utah, specifically focusing on local blog and mainstream media coverage of political news; congressional news updates, press releases and votes; a calendar of events including legislative meetings and messaging from all viable political parties and candidates.
  • $5,000 to Pacific Northwest Topic Hotlist (http://www.topichotlist.com),which aggregates over 100 political news blogs in the Pacific Northwest and organizes several hundred postings by topic, specifically highlighting coverage by local bloggers of legislative issues and their representatives in Congress. This grant provides funding for Web hosting services for this news aggregator site and its accompanying widgets.
  • $5,000 to Geocoder.us (http://geocoder.us), which provides free address look-up information based on the U.S. Census, so that users can enter any address or intersection and learn the longitude and latitude coordinates for that location. The mini-grant supports the creation of an API to show congressional district boundaries for all U.S. addresses and the improvement of the site's open source address recognition system. Ultimately, this funding will support the site's ability to ascertain a congressional district from an address without the need to manually look up a zip+4 code on the U.S. Postal Service Web site.
  • $5,000 to Speechology.org (http://speechology.org): to support the creation and maintenance of a Web site that will archive video of key political speeches-including debates, State of the Union addresses, convention speeches congressional testimony and campaign advertisements-and facilitate online public critical analysis. Using Speechology.org, citizens will watch, evaluate and comment on the truthfulness of the speeches.
  • $2,400 to the Philbrick-James Forum (http://www.forumhome.org/), a volunteer, non-profit citizen newspaper for its “i on NH Congress” section, for non-partisan coverage of the New Hampshire congressional delegation.
  • $2,500 to Richmond Sunlight (http://www.richmondsunlight.com): The Richmond Sunlight Web site monitors the activity of the Virginia legislature. Sunlight's mini-grant supports the purchase of an entire session of the Virginia Legislature's closed circuit video broadcast. The video will be then converted to QuickTime, posted on YouTube on a daily basis and integrated into the Richmond Sunlight Web site.
  • $3,900 to the Public Justice Foundation of Texas (http://www.tpj.org/) for their work to support a one-time fee for access to the Texas Supreme Court case management database, to allow exploration of the connection between Texas judicial campaign contributors and the rulings of Texas state courts.
  • $1,600 to WhereABill.org (http://www.whereabill.org) to create a new, dynamic bill-viewing system for GovTrack.us.
  • $3,000 to Public.Resource.org (http://public.resource.org/) to support the purchase of the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations for redistribution as a public good, thus upholding the value of making government information available by lowering barriers.

2007

  • $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.
  • $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.
  • $10,000 to Public Resource, Inc. (http://public.resource.org) in support of the development of a series of conferences on open government.
  • $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.

2006

  • $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.