On April 26, 2006 the Sunlight Foundation began as an experiment to empower citizens and encourage transparency in government through new technology and online tools. Today, we turn seven years old and we're proud to continue that mission with a stronger community than ever.

Thank you to all those who have supported our work through financial contributions, attending our events like the approaching TransparencyCamp and simply engaging us in conversation. We are stronger and better because of the vibrant community that surrounds us.

I met Sandra Moscoso at TransparencyCamp last year and was immediately impressed by her work opening up D.C. public school data to improve area schools. She is an obvious choice to be this month’s OpenGov Champion.

  During the daytime, Sandra manages an open data portal at the World Bank for the bank’s financial sector, so she is familiar with the usefulness of open data. But it is her work in her local D.C. community that sets her apart. As a mom of two public school students, she is a member of the Capitol Hill Public School Parent Organization (CHPSPO), which looks to improve the local school system by organizing rallies and bake sales, restoring school buildings and talking to city officials. Sandra is often very hands-on in these activities, but her biggest personal mission with CHPSPO has been introducing the use of open government data as a basis in all they do.

As you can see in the video, she and other CHPSPO members were able to collect data to show how the schools that had a full time librarian had better test score results than those who had lost theirs due to budget cuts. The group was able to use that figure as an effective basis for their request to the city to restore funding for librarians. She also recently sent an open letter to Mayor Vincent Gray, asking for public school data she wanted use in an Open Data Day Hackathon in D.C. The city released the data, and even sent a data analyst to the hackathon, too. Who knows if Mayor Gray's administration would release this data had Sandra not publicly asked for it? Going to Sandra’s home to film the interview felt more like visiting family friends for brunch. Which, in fact, they were preparing as we arrived. Sandra and her husband have a cozy Victorian townhouse in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. We saw some very nice Lego projects and other things created by her smart and sweet kids and heard about how much they love their school.

“I have the best community here in Capitol Hill” Sandra says. She knows most of her neighbors, many of which also actively participate in neighborhood projects and politics. “I want them to stay.” Many D.C. families end up moving to the suburbs in Virginia and Maryland when their kids hit middle school age, as public middle schools in the District have a bad reputation and it’s a vulnerable age for children. She hopes to improve the situation by advocating for better schools, armed with all the open data she can get her hands on and a lot of enthusiasm. Her home was not the only place where we filmed. When I first approached Sandra about filming her for the OpenGov Champion series, she sent me a flurry of links to tons of activities she was doing around town. If you follow her on Twitter, there's barely a day goes by without her tweeting to D.C. government officials, trying to make them see the usefulness of opening their data and that there are people out there like her who really want to put said data to use.

A case in point was when in 2010 she and a group of other engaged parents drafted a proposal using open DC Public School data as well as data they collected for a new middle schools plan that the then D.C. Public School Chancellor Michelle Rhee approved and implemented (although not perfectly.) Sandra thinks that the most effective change happens at the local level, by people who truly care about what is happening in their own community. That is why having access to local government data is so important, and the more detailed and specific the better: it enables OpenGov Champions like Sandra and many others to be better advocates for their communities.

Our OpenGov Champions are remarkable ordinary people who have done extraordinary things to open up our government. Get inspired by their stories and nominate someone in your community to become an OpenGov Champion.

Last week was busy and exciting here at Sunlight as we marked another successful Sunshine Week. It was a great opportunity to not only share our work in making government more open and transparent but to hear from others about their progress in matters of freedom of information. Here are some highlights from Sunshine Week 2013.

Open States Transparency Report Card

We released our very first Open States Transparency Report Card on March 11, which rated all 50 states and DC on the openness of their legislative data. We evaluated each state across six factors  -- completeness, timeliness, ease of access, machine readability, use of commonly owned standards and permanence -- to get grades from A to F. Our Open State project also received kudos from the New York Times data team, as it recommended the Open States API as the best resource for those who want legislative data about New York state since the paper was shutting down the API it created.

Sunlight Speaks Out

Throughout Sunshine Week, Sunlight staff participated in a number of events to commemorate the week and address the work we do. Thanks to all who kicked off the week at our DC happy hour to celebrate President James Madison’s birthday. Head over to our Flickr page to see all the festivities from last Monday.

On March 12, Editorial Director Bill Allison was in Philadelphia speaking at WHYY’s public forum on Open Data 101. He was a panelist along with the head of Pennsylvania’s Open Records Office Terry Mutchler, New Jersey open records expert Marc Pfeiffer and Holly Otterbein from WHYY. Follow the evening’s conversation on Storify or watch a video clip of the panel.

Also on March 12, Policy Counsel Daniel Schuman moderated a Congressional Transparency Caucus panel which brought together FOIA experts to explore ways the FOIA process could be improved and made more easily accessible to the public.

Daniel was on Capitol Hill again on Wednesday, this time testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform committee. His testimony -- which you can read about here -- encouraged the Oversight Committee to continue its good work, to adopt the government’s best transparency initiatives, and to help the Obama Administration meet its pledge to be the most transparent once ever.

Bill Allison was back on the FOIA speaking circuit on March 14 at a National Press Club panel with award-winning reporter Charles Babcock, now an editor at Bloomberg News; Randy Rabinowitz, director of regulatory policy for the Center for Effective Government; Lisette Garcia, senior investigator at Judicial Watch.

We concluded Sunshine Week with two events. First, Policy Director John Wonderlich spoke at a National Freedom of Information Day panel at the Newseum, hosted by OpenTheGovernment.org and the First Amendment Center. There, he outlined how the Obama Administration could make real progress on open government. You can make out some of the faces that attended here.

Sunshine Week would not be complete without a #FOIA chat. Sunshine Review invited Bill Allison as a guest during its weekly Twitter chat, where he shared FOIA tips and walked participants through the FOIA request submission process. During the Twitter chat, Bill also shared some resources which you may find useful in your own pursuit of public records. In case you missed it, here is a Storify recap.

The important work that we all do around open government and freedom of information shouldn’t end at Sunshine Week. Visit our Participate page to get involved year round.

Meet Shea Frederick, our latest OpenGov Champion. Last September, Sunlight’s video team -- myself and Associate Video Producer Solay Howell -- spent two days in Baltimore, MD, with Shea to see how he uses city open data to build useful tools for Charm City residents.

One of those tools is baltimorevacants.org, a dynamic map that lets you search and see more than 30,000 vacant houses and vacant lots in Baltimore. To capture on video the source of that data, we drove around Baltimore filming abandoned houses, streets and even entire blocks that are just left to decay, attracting crime and rats.

Like Shea says in the video, it’s impactful to see 30,000 vacant houses or lots mapped out over the city. But it is even more powerful to see the actual places. I’m still haunted by the sight of all those vacant, rotting houses with boarded up windows and doors we saw all over Baltimore. As a visual storyteller, I could imagine how each one of these houses has a story to tell. Maybe a factory closed, people lost their jobs, packed up and moved, and after enough of their neighbors had left, the ones left behind could not bear to live on an empty street and finally they all went.

Looking at Shea’s work, I realized that data can be used tell a story too, one from real life that literally “connects the dots” and paints with broader strokes to get the full picture. That’s why Shea loves hacking on the open data the City of Baltimore started releasing in 2011: there is always a real life connection to the work he is doing and he can see it all around him.

Another one is an app called Spot Agent that uses parking citation data to warn you if a meter maid might be close by. Then there’s one that uses the city’s 311 data to show the most common problems occurring in any Baltimore neighborhood based on words that appear the most in the service requests, such as “trash,” “rat,” “illegal” or “light.”

He does a lot of this work with the help of other developers and interested citizens, connected through hackathons and other events. There is a vibrant community for this sort of work in Baltimore such that when the city started releasing its data sets through the Open Baltimore portal there already was an active bunch of people ready to go and put it to use. The city has been pleased with that, as these civic hackers can build something for fun and for free in a weekend that would take them weeks, maybe even months to complete and cost tens of thousands of dollars. Shea has been tag-teaming with the city directly, using the data it released and giving the city advice on how the data could be improved upon, mainly that it should be updated in real time instead of doing a one-time dump.

Why does Shea Frederick spend so much of his own time sorting out this data into meaningful, usable formats when he might as well be competing in a cyclocross race somewhere? Well, for one, he loves what he does. And second, he has grown to love Baltimore and wants to give back by giving others tools that can help them connect with what’s happening around the city. This is OpenGov Championship at work: taking data that’s available and putting it to use, and working together with the local government to make it even better.

Our OpenGov Champions are remarkable ordinary people who have done extraordinary things to open up our government. Get inspired by their stories and nominate someone in your community to become an OpenGov Champion.

Exactly one week ago we launched Sitegeist, an app to learn more about your surroundings through visualizations of publicly available data. We are immensely proud of Sitegeist and thrilled by the response! As of yesterday afternoon, we have more than 20,000 downloads from both the iPhone and Android versions. Most exciting of all is that there have been more than 300,000 paneviews, which are individuals loading different categories of data. It's the metric we're watching to see how much people interact with and explore the data. It's a big beautiful number and we hope you keep coming back for more!

Media coverage of the launch of Sitegeist was stellar with everything from the Washington Post's Wonkblog to Boing Boing. Gizmodo's review proclaimed that Sitegeist will "scrub a mountain of publicly available data, chew it up for you, and spit easy-to-read infographics right into your mouth like a loving mama bird." Indeed. They even named it one of their Apps of the Week! Android Police said "Not only does the app provide some really useful information, but it looks damn good doing it" and FlowingData summed it up nicely as "Data just a flick and a scroll away."

We're tickled pink with these write-ups but it's also great to hear directly from the users. Hundreds of folks have shared their thoughts on Sitegeist and many come armed with helpful suggestions for new data they'd like to see or bug reports we're rushing to squash. We've updated the inaccurate hazard icon and greased the stubborn "Political Contributions" see-saw! We are hoping to add more features soon and will let you know as we incorporate more improvements (and data!).

I will assume those of you who have not downloaded Sitegeist yet are clamoring to download it now, but for all of you that already have: thank you. Be sure to open the app up when you're home for the holidays and have a happy new year!