Today the Sunlight Foundation unveils our latest app to reinforce the power of the data around you. It's called Sitegeist, a simple iPhone and Android app that presents a huge amount of information from disparate sources in straight-forward infographics. Just scroll and swipe your way through rich statistics about your location from demographics to popular local venues.

Sitegeist is a mobile application that helps you to learn more about your surroundings in seconds. Drawing on publicly available information, the app presents solid data in a simple at-a-glance format to help you tap into the pulse of your location. From statistical data on the people and housing to the latest popular spots or weather, Sitegeist presents localized information visually so you can get back to enjoying the neighborhood.

The app is intuitively designed such that location-specific information that would be normally difficult to track down is now all together in one place on your smartphone. As you user, just launch the app, plug in your location or a spot you're curious about and then swipe between the categories of data. Age distributions, political contributions, median home values, record temperatures and much more will appear instantly. We will continue to add new data and bolster the app as we get public feedback so please let us know with your tweets, email and comments.

Behind the scenes we dug up publicly available data and brought thousands of records together just to display one fact about your location. For example, when you drop a pin on the map and see the age distributions, we are pulling age data from the 2010 U.S. census based on the specific census tract the pin you dropped on the map is in. You don't need to know where to find the census data or even know what census tract you're in, just drop the pin and learn. Sitegeist presents a fresh perspective on a location and lets you consume complex information immediately taking on Herbert Simon's famous observation, "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." If you happen to have a wealth of attention, tap on much of data to get more information from the source. Find a contaminated site nearby? Tap to be taken to the EPA's site with a longer description of the issue.

Sitegeist was created by the Sunlight Foundation with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and is the third in a series of National Data Apps. The first two National Data Apps are Sunlight Health, that brings healthcare ratings data and prescription drug safety information to your pocket, and Upwardly Mobile, a web app that helps users find a better place to live by comparing salary, living and employment data and ranking it based on their preferences. Sitegeist was created by the Sunlight Foundation, in consultation with design firm IDEO.

It’s August and that means soon it’ll be back to school for students and teachers. Even if you have long put away your TI-84 Calculator or finally paid off your student loans, it’s still never too late to pick up a new skill.

Get ready to sharpen your figurative pencils and sign up for Sunlight Academy, our new interactive training portal that provides instructional and educational resources to make government more transparent and accountable. So whether you are an investigative journalist trying to get insight on a complex data set, an activist uncovering the hidden influence behind your issue or a congressional staffer in need of mastering legislative data, our transparency training program will teach you how to better connect the dots and make our tools and resources work for you.

The modules on offer at the Sunlight Academy are diverse. Ever wondered how to create a pivot table to analyze government data? Need help understanding the different lobbying reports? Or what exactly are APIs (and why do we talk about them so often)? Watch this tutorial to find out. After you have finished a lesson, don’t forget to mark the module as “completed” to earn prizes and other rewards.

Online courses are a popular, helpful and low-cost (zero, for Sunlight Academy!) way to boost your knowledge in the workplace or classroom. In fact, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation just released a new report indicating that newsrooms are eager for digital learning opportunities.

Sunlight Academy aims to share the knowledge and expertise of the Sunlight Foundation, but we need your help to keep the courses fresh and relevant. Email tutorial suggestions to  training@sunlightfoundation.com.

In the meantime, sign up for an account at Sunlight Academy and check back often for new training lessons and events.

Never stop learning!

We're excited to announce Upwardly Mobile, Sunlight's new webapp funded by the Knight Foundation that allows you to research where in the country you could enjoy financial security and an improved quality of life. Upwardly Mobile is an easy-to-use relocation research tool backed by powerful economic data, allowing granular comparisons without digging through arcane government reports for each indicator. We sifted through all this data so you don't have to, and this information is now presented seamlessly on any mobile or tablet platform.

Just enter your zipcode, career information and cost-of-living importance and then Upwardly Mobile gets to work generating a list of ideal places for you to move. Alternatively, you can browse individual cities to compare them to national averages. Through charts and graphs, you can explore how metropolitan areas of similar size compare to where you live now, including:

• Occupation: Both the average salary for the selected occupation over time and income data for the entire metropolitan area.

• Housing costs: Rents, as well as maintenance services and goods such as furniture and appliances.

• Cost of living: Apparel, education, food and childcare.

• Quality of life costs: Recreation, transportation and health care.

Part of putting this responsively designed app together included deciding which economic factors make the greatest difference in people’s lives. For instance, we decided that salary and housing costs are more important than other economic indicators such as the cost of recreation services. These weights impact the base ranking, but the importance attached to each economic category can be changed by your selections in the survey. For more information on this methodology and the technical background, check out my colleague Jeremy's blog post here.

The Upwardly Mobile app utilizes data comes from many sources: Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Federal Financial Institutions Examinations Council, Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies and the U.S. Census.

Upwardly Mobile is the second in a series of National Data Apps, developed with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The first was Sunlight Health, which helps people make more informed decisions about medical care. Sunlight also created mobile apps for monitoring lawmakers: Congress for Android and Windows phones and Real Time Congress for iPhone. The recently launched OpenStates app for iPhone and iPad tracks the inner-workings of all 50 state legislatures.

Note: 4/3/12, 5:25 p.m. This post has been updated to clarify the weighting of salary and housing costs against other economic indicators.

The Sunlight Foundation would like to extend a hearty congratulations to the 2011 winners of the Knight News Challenge just announced today at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference. They are an impressive collection of folks and we are excited to see such innovative ideas gain the support they need to expand.

Among the many winners we're particular thrilled to see some familiar faces. Waldo Jaquith, a Sunlight mini-grant recipient for his work at Richmond Sunlight in 2008 getting video online from the Virginia legislature, got funding for the State Decoded platform to make state codes easier to use and understand. DocumentCloud, a great tool to annotate documents for journalists that has won News Challenge funding in the past, is a Sunlight favorite whose lead developer is a two-time winner of our Apps for America contest. We're also big fans of ScraperWiki, a collaborative approach to building web scrapers to free data that has huge potential for journalists and others to sniff out interesting data. We look forward to learning about all the winners of this year's challenge and will certainly look forward to integrating them into our work.

It's so incredibly exciting to see the new ideas for open government and engaging citizens that have won these awards this year. Our community is getting bigger and better every year.

The Knight News Challenge is an initiative that promotes projects around the globe to transform journalism through innovative new tools and has funded over 75 projects with $27 million over the past 5 years. The Knight Foundation provides grant support to the Sunlight Foundation and we are proud to continue our partnership.

Sunshine Week starts with a new report from the National Security Archive and the Knight Foundation that finds only 49 of 90 agencies have adopted 'concrete steps' to improve their responsiveness to Freedom of Information Act requests. This is incredibly disheartening, though an improvement on the numbers from last year's study that found 13 of 90 agencies following up. The agencies' failure to meet even the administration's low bar is unacceptable. The two 'concerte steps' are simply updating the language in FOIA training documents to presume openness and to assess whether resources for compliance are adequate.

The report stems from Obama's Executive Order that called for greater FOIA openness [link], one of the first official acts he made as President, a follow-up memo from Attorney General Eric Holder detailing the new principles on FOIA [pdf link] and another memo a year later from former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and former Counsel to the President Bob Bauer asking agencies to please take the baby steps previously promised [pdf link].

“At this rate, the president’s first term in office will be over by the time federal agencies do what he asked them to do on his first day in office,” commented Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which funded the study. “Freedom of information laws exist to help all of us get the information we need for this open society to function. Yet government at all levels seems to have a great deal of trouble obeying its own transparency laws.” Modeled after the California Sunshine Survey and subsequent state “FOI Audits,” the Archive’s series of Knight Open Government Surveys started in 2002 and use open government laws to test whether or not agencies are obeying those same laws. Recommendations from previous Knight Open Government Surveys led directly to laws and executive orders which have: set explicit customer service guidelines, mandated FOIA backlog reduction, assigned individualized FOIA tracking numbers, forced agencies to report the average number of days needed to process requests, and revealed the (often embarrassing) ages of the oldest pending FOIA requests.

Among the varying responses from agencies, the most stunning result was the U.S. Postal Service saying it had "no responsive records" and never even received the Emanuel-Bauer memo! Below is a chart of the ratings of each agency:

This election season, we’ve tracked (in real time) the explosion of outside spending – now at $427 million and climbing, the D.C.-based fundraisers for candidates running on “outside the Beltway” credentials and, with your help, cataloged political ads and who pays for them using Sunlight CAM. All signs point to a record-breaking Election Day for campaign cash, so we’ll be up until the wee hours that night shining a light on the money behind the winners.

Join us Election Night from 7 p.m. – midnight(ish) as we use our award-winning "Sunlight Live" real-time, investigative platform to follow the money trail for midterm congressional seats as races are called. Our video coverage will include PBS Newshour and our own original reporting. We’ll follow the money behind the top competitive (or otherwise compelling) races, covering the campaign contributors and non-party groups—such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Crossroads GPS and America's Families First Action Fund—that "won," showing data on the huge independent expenditures made in key races this cycle.

Confused about who the real winners are this election? Make sure to tune in and send us your questions, so you can know who won the shadow race.

And if you're in DC, please come to our office for our Election Night Watch Party. RSVP on our Facebook page. You can also organize your own watch party using our Meetup page.

(Sunlight Live is generously supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.)

Everyone's writing about politicians these days -- especially these days -- so Sunlight's developed a tool to help enliven that article, blog post or comment. Our thinking was that when you write about a member of Congress, you should be able to insert contextual information about who funds their campaigns, who gets their earmarks and the like, into a blog post or news article as easily as you can embed a YouTube video. We designed our Politiwidgets to do just that.

We have ten free Politiwidgets that can help you display lawmakers' top campaign contributors, earmarks they have requested, their voting record on any current bill, where their fundraisers are, etc. They are all based on data from groups like the Center for Responsive Politics so you know they're factually correct and contain the very latest information. They’re completely customizable too so you can selected the size and color or each widget. Plus, you never have to refresh the data. We do that for you on the ‘backend’ of your widget daily. If you’re writing about any member of Congress, instead of just putting up the same-old picture of a Representative or Senator, you can use a Politiwidget to give your readers an interactive way to learn more about them, and perhaps do some of their own investigative work.

When the Sunlight Labs created these Politiwidgets, we were challenged by our funder, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, to ensure that 50 websites used them by Election Day (November 2, 2010). Today we have 106 sites that have implemented Politwidgets into their reporting routine!

Sites have used Politiwidgets as a way to easily show information about incumbents in their area such as the Afro-American Newspaper, a news provider in the Baltimore/DC region, on its Afro’s Election 2010 page. WNYMedia used three of our geo-location Politiwidgets on the right rail of their site to show anyone looking at their site their members of Congress' earmarks, contributions and contact information.

In a nutshell, no matter how the widgets have been used, we have doubled our goal of placements for this election cycle. But we feel that we aren't quite done! Sunlight wants our Politiwidgets to become the part of every political blogger’s and reporter’s routine. So go and get more. Really try to work them into your sites in the last few days before the election.

And after this election is completed, we'll be preparing the Politiwidgets for the 112th Congress. We'd love to know what other information you’d like to see. We promise it will be as timely and as accurate as possible.

I’m thrilled to announce that the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation just announced a new $1.2 million two-year grant to us to support Sunlight in our nascent “National Data Apps” initiative that allows us to give you access to more government data that affects you in your daily life. The funding also allows us to further expand our award-winning Sunlight Live real-time accountability platform that combines streaming video, government transparency data, journalistic background and social media coverage of major events in Washington. (Be sure to tune in on Election night, when we’ll cover the results of this year’s mid-term elections.)

Our Sunlight Labs will design -- along with our Reporting Group --  the National Data Apps and issue reports on the government’s track record for making this kind of data available to the public. Additionally, the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group will train journalists, bloggers and other members of the media on how to use the National Data Apps when they are launched in early-2011. (Use the comments below to let us know if you’re interested in this kind of training, or send us an email.)

Knight’s previous funding of Sunlight has supported our creation of Poligraft, Influence Explorer and our free embeddable Politiwidgets about members of Congress that you’ve seen used in our blog posts and on some of your hometown newspapers’ websites.

In conjunction with next week’s Sunshine Week, Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University have released the results of their annual survey on government secrecy. They’ve conducted the survey each year since 2006, when 62 percent surveyed believed the federal government to be somewhat or very secretive. That percentage grew each year up to 74 percent last year. This year’s figure indicates that perceptions are leveling off, with 73 percent characterizing the feds as secretive. At least it’s stopped growing.

The authors of the study credit the finding that 80 percent of those surveyed agreed with President Obama's Freedom of Information directive calling for a presumption of disclosure as possibly blunting the rising distrust in government.

In each of the four annual surveys, Americans believe their local and state governments are more open than the feds. And they are more trusting of local public officials. Check out more details here.

Next Monday is Sunshine Week, the fifth incarnation of the national initiative to highlight the importance of open government and freedom of information. Journalists of both old and new media, librarians, non-profits, schools and anyone else who values the public's right to know are involved. The American Society of Newspaper Editors organizes the initiative, while the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is the primary funder.

Check it all out here.