The political Web continues to grow as new databases are established every week regularly using new technologies to present important information. I came across three new Web sites, one government and two from nonprofits, today and figured I'd pass them along. The first is the Government Printing Office's online guide to members of Congress. The GPO's online guide allows users to search members of Congress by a number of categories, including name, hometown, terms served, and more. The database is fairly rudimentary but it does allow someone to do quick searches for members from a particular state or see how many members have served for 5 terms. This is good step for GPO as it shows that they looking towards using the Web to project information; all they need is to add more search categories and more information for the member profiles. More links to more information makes the data more useful.

The man who really introduced me to the power of Internet (long story, see his explanation here) -- Gavin Clabaugh -- reminds us what shining a light into hidden corners of Washington, and mixing the data with a bit of technology and a handful of the Internet (with a little Miller and co-conspirator pixy dust thrown in) can do. He says that the combination may result in nothing short of the power to save democracy from itself. I promise you, Gavin was not sitting at the table when we hatched the idea for Sunlight (though his wife was my communications director when I headed the Center for Responsive Politics, so maybe there's something in the bloodline).

Already the Sunlight Mash-Up Labs announced in May is striding toward my fantasy of one-click political influence disclosure. Last week, Lab Co-director, Greg Elin, guided me through the results of a week of "hacking" with Mike Krejci, lead programmer for The Institute of Money in State Politics. Supported by a small grant from the Sunlight Foundation, Greg went to Portland, Oregon and helped Mike begin work on The Institute's "web services API".

I've long had the fantasy of one-click political influence disclosure. Imagine pressing one button and finding everything you need and want to know about a member of Congress, or a corporation, labor union or individual trying to influence her. Web 2.0 technologies - Web services, API's, XML, AJAX, RSS - now make that possible.

To speed up making this happen, this week we decided to create a small, informal "Mash-Up Lab." We are going to treat this as a pilot project for six months to experiment on our own and to provide ad-hoc technical support to nurture other mash-up projects -- some of which Sunlight has already  nurtured, to realize a one-click future. These will be projects that strategically and tactically bring together nonprofit organizations, exemplary developers, and web-applications.

Information Mashing. Don't you just love that term? It's one of the major goals of Sunlight and while we've been working on it for the past couple of months we have a ways to go before it happens in any substantial way. Our goal is simple: integrate in a user-friendly way individual data sets (like campaign contributions, lobbyists and government contracts) that makes the whole larger than the sum of its parts.

We'd like to create something we've dubbed an "Accountability Matrix."  A website where, with one click you can look up a major donor and see not just their campaign contributions, but also their lobbying expenditures, the names of members who've flown on their private jet, the names of former congressional staffers they've hired, and so on.