Tonight the Sunlight Foundation will cover President Obama's 2011 State of the Union using our award-winning Sunlight Live platform of real-time investigative reporting. We will provide real-time transparency of the annual State of the Union and make our analysis participatory in a way we couldn't have before the Web. We invite all citizens to join us and submit questions as we live-blog, fact-check on-the-fly and provide contextual analysis about the influences shaping President Obama's statements at the moment they are spoken.

The unified Sunlight Live page brings together the speech's live streaming video, contextual data, reporting and social media. Sunlight's Reporting Group is joined by The Huffington Post, National Journal, CQ Roll Call and the Center for Public Integrity. We believe this expanded and accomplished team will be the most comprehensive live coverage available with insight to the proposals, people and policies mentioned during the speech. The Sunlight Foundation is committed to sharing this platform and encourage others to embed it on their own sites.

The fun begins at 8:30 pm EST at http://www.sunlightlive.com.

We hope you join us.

Kevin Connor & Matthew Skomarovsky, co-founders of Sunlight-supported LittleSis.org, announced yesterday they are joining forces with The Huffington Post Investigative Fund's Health Care Investigative Unit on a joint research project. They will be reporting on the congressional lawmakers that receive the most money from health care interest groups. Here's a list of those lawmakers, as produced by The Huffington Post and Maplight.org. And you can sign up with the investigative unit here.

Also, within the next few weeks, LittleSis will be launching an application programming interface (API) to provide developers and friendly organizations access to their raw data. Anyone interested in previewing the API can register for a key, and you can check out the API's documentation here.

On Tuesday, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for the 13th annual the Webby Awards, "the Oscars of the Internet." The academy selects the nominees and winners of what has been termed “the Internet’s highest honor.” And like in past years, a number of Sunlight's friends and grantees received nominations. I know that in naming a few I will miss others. Sorry if I didn't catch all our friends!

The Center for Responsive Politics’ newly redesigned OpenSecrets.org received a nomination in the category of best politics site of 2009. If they were to win, it would be their fifth Webby. The academy nominated Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s (CREW) site GovernmentDocs.org, which allows users to easily brouse and search FOIA documents, has been nominated for a Webby in the “Government” category.  (Sunlight has funded both those projects.) In the “Activism” category, Why Tuesday? received a nomination.

In the “Online Film and Video” section’s “News and Politics: Individual Episode” category, American News Project, founded and run by my friend and former colleague Nick Penniman, received a nomination for their investigation titled “Iraq and Drop Weapons.”

The academy decides who the winners will be, but the "People's Voice" Webby Award is decided by people who go to their site and vote. So, from now till the end of this month, each of us can cast a ballot for the "People's Voice" award. You can find your own “People’s Voice” ballot here. Lawrence Lessig said OpenSecrets gets his vote.

Congrats to all the nominees!

Each weekday, Sunlight's communications team collects all the press mentions of Sunlight and of our grantees.  Instead of just keeping that to ourselves, we thought we'd try something new by highlighting some of the more interesting mentions  and sharing that with you each week. (You can also check out our Delicious page and our Press Center to see who's writing about us.)

Elizabeth Brotherton at Roll Call (subscription required), Associated Press Managing Editors, Paul Krawzak with CQ Politics and Deb Price with The Detroit News wrote stories about about U.S. House of Representatives lawmakers posting their earmark requests for the 2010 budget on their Web sites as new transparency guidelines required. Bill Allison, Sunlight’s senior fellow, researched the disclosures. Journalists used Bill's research as the base for their articles, including many regional papers reporting on earmarks requested by their respective congressional delegations.

National Journal’s "Tech Daily Dose" blog reported that the Center for Responsive Politics’ site OpenSecrets.org is going "open data" this week. For the first time in their 26-year history, CRP "is making its most popular data archives fully available to the public for download for free,” The Journal writes.  Sunlight helped fund CRP's OpenData initiative to make millions of records available under a Creative Commons license, The Journal adds.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg with The New York Times wrote about President Obama's promise to bring transparency to the federal government. She notes the administration is finding that fulfilling the pledge is easier said than done. Technological hurdles, privacy concerns and the Washington's entrenched culture of secrecy have so far proven hard to overcome. Stolberg lists several steps the Obama team have successfully taken, the streamlining of a health care summit over the White House Web site and the setting up of Recovery.gov to help track the stimulus package. She quotes Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, as saying the site is “an amazing potential model of how information is made available to the public."

The Huffington Post published an op-ed by Mike Klein, Sunlight’s co-founder and chair, where he commends President Obama for establishing a transparency policy applicable to lobbying and the stimulus program. Mike encouraged the administration to not limit transparency just to lobbying the stimulus program. "The president should now mandate real time online transparency of lobbying throughout the executive branch." He also called on Congress to amend the Lobbying Disclosure Act so that lobbyists would be required to disclose all lobbying, whether of the Congress, the executive branch or the independent agencies, and in real time and online. Ryan Singel at Wired's "Epicenter" blog profiles Sunlight Labs’ contest Apps for America, and asked his readers to vote for their favorites.  Mark Tapscott, editorial page editor of the Washington Examiner, also wrote about Apps for America. Winter Casey and Bara Vaida at National Journal's "Under the Influence" blog and Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones wrote about mockups of Web-based lobbying disclosure forms John Wonderlich, Sunlight’s policy director, and Ali Felski, Sunlight Lab’s senior designer, created.