Frequently Asked Questions about the Sunlight Foundation and its projects:

What is the Sunlight Foundation?

Founded in January 2006, the Sunlight Foundation, a 501 (c)(3) educational organization, supports, develops and deploys new Internet technologies to make information about Congress and the federal government more accessible to the American people. Through its projects and grant-making, Sunlight serves as a catalyst to create greater political transparency and to foster more openness and accountability in government.

Why does the Sunlight Foundation exist?

Quite simply, concern about the influence of money, lobbying and political relationships, as well as a fear of corruption in Congress, reached crisis levels in 2005, with 75% of the voters in the last congressional election saying it motivated their voting. In August 2007, public approval ratings of Congress reached an all-time low, with just 18% of Americans approving of the job Congress is doing, according to a Gallup poll. But until Sunlight's founding, there was no organization fully committed to enhancing the electronic disclosure of congressional activity on the Internet, and thus, engage citizens in an effective dialogue with their members of Congress.

To provide that access, the Sunlight Foundation is utilizing information technology and the revolutionary power of the Internet to make millions of bits of information available online about the members of Congress, their staff, and lobbyists. This information includes political contributions and expenditures, lobbyists expenditures and activities, changes in the net worth, travel and entertainment, earmarks, and legislative activity of members of Congress.

By improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and Web sites to enable all of us to pool our intelligence in new, and yet to be imagined ways, Sunlight is an effort to help citizens, journalists and bloggers become better watchdogs. In the future, as a result of Sunlight's efforts, anyone-journalists, bloggers, citizens-- will be able to go online and discover, for example, how many lawmakers own stock in companies that have legislation pending before Congress, which lobbyists represented corporations that received federal earmark funding or which lawmakers employed members of their own family on their congressional payroll.

Ultimately, Sunlight aims to help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy.

What makes Sunlight any different from the dozens of "good government" groups that already exist in the name of cleaning up Congress?

Sunlight is unique in its commitment to total transparency and its broad and open use of information technology. This, combined with the Web 2.0 spirit of harnessing the collective intelligence of citizens by engaging them in our work, is at the core of all our efforts.

Our "transparency grants" go beyond the traditional, single subject public disclosure database, to the Web 2.0 ethos of inviting everyone-the media, bloggers, citizens and good government groups-to sift, share and combine this information in innovative ways that they find most are useful for them. Similarly, our Congresspedia.org project is based on "the wisdom of crowds" and the maxim that "many hands make light work." We believe traditional journalism performs a vital public function, but we also believe that the Internet age enables ordinary citizens to be their own watchdogs. Our goal, thus, is to engage as many as possible to pool their energy and talents to report and find out about the behavior of congressmen, senators, their staffs and those who lobby them, and share that information online.

Does the Sunlight Foundation have a political bias?

No, Sunlight is nonpartisan in its call for increased transparency in Congress.

How is the Sunlight Foundation funded?

The Sunlight Foundation was launched in April 2006 with a $3.5 million contribution from co-founder and Chairman Michael Klein, a Washington, DC-based attorney and businessman. Beyond Mike Klein's original contribution, Sunlight is also supported by the Omidyar Network, which provided a grant of $2 million for 2007, and by individuals and foundations. Our full list of donors is available here.

Why did the Sunlight Foundation create the Sunlight Labs?

We live in an amazing time, when the evolution of the Web is enabling the creation of versatile new services, tools, and other software at a rapid pace, and the highly networked world of Web sites and blogs is making it possible to spread information and capacities incredibly quickly. That understanding led Sunlight to create the Sunlight Labs, our flagship in-house development team of programmers, designers and analysts. This crack team, who together have decades of Web experience, works closely with the Foundation's own investigative research staff as well as with a number of major grantees on data sharing, buzz-generating mashups and hands-on technical support.

Sunlight Labs uses its experience and growing library of open source code to move the Sunlight Foundation and its grantees into a leadership role demonstrating how the Web can enable meaningful citizen participation and create avenues for renewed trust between citizens and their elected officials.

What kind of projects has Sunlight launched thus far?

Since our founding in the spring of 2006, the Sunlight Foundation has assembled and funded an array of databases and Web-based software tools and Web sites aiming to help investigative reporters, politics junkies and ordinary citizens better monitor and illuminate the interplay of money, lobbying, influence and government in Washington to a degree never before possible. The creation of these databases and the technologies applied to them that free the data from their silos has created an unprecedented demand for more: more information, more transparency, and more easy-to-use tools. These projects are described in more detail below.

Citizen Journalism: In 2006, Sunlight launched a series of distributed reporting and research projects that looked initially at congressional financial disclosure forms, investigated earmarks in appropriations bills, and identified those members of the House of Representatives who have hired their spouses to work for their reelection campaign committees. From our experiments in distributed reporting, we have learned more about how best to structure these projects to ensure widespread participation; and we have identified the beginnings of what we hope will become a core group of citizen journalists who both care about openness in government and are eager to participate in future Sunlight projects. The second phase of "Is Congress a Family Business?" was designed with substantial input from some of the volunteer collaborators who participated in the first round. Sunlight also made grants to two of the most prominent experiments in citizen journalism, Jay Rosen's "New Assignment.net," and Dan Gillmor's Center for Citizen Media. Energized by what we are learning from these endeavors, we expect to continue grant-making in this arena with emphasis on projects that combine professional and amateur contributions to investigating Congress.

Congresspedia.org: Launched in April 2006, Congresspedia is a joint project of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and the Sunlight Foundation. We believe that one new way to clean up Congress is to engage as many citizens as possible in pooling what they know and what they can find out about their representatives' behavior. This Sunlight inspired and funded "wiki" hosted on CMD's SourceWatch utilizes "citizen reporting" to display information about every member of Congress, the issues that he or she is involved with and all candidates running for Congress. As a wiki, its content can be drafted and edited by anyone. It has professional editors who fact-check and edit user submissions in order to maintain a high degree of accuracy, fairness and non-partisanship.

Investigating Earmarks: Public interest in earmarks has continued to rise since Sunlight's 2006 collaboration with other organizations to identify the earmarks in the 2006 Health and Human Services Appropriations Bill. ("Earmarks" are the pet projects lawmakers have traditionally inserted in appropriations bills with little public oversight.) In the spring of 2007, Sunlight Labs created a searchable database of the 2005 earmarks and standardized recipient names in order to publish a story on earmark spending. To go along with the story, Sunlight Labs added the earmark data to IBM Research's visualization tool "Many Eyes." Following that, Sunlight partnered with Taxpayers for Common Sense, to create EarmarkWatch.org, a user-friendly, online investigative tool and social networking site that lets citizens determine if earmarks address pressing needs, favor political contributors or are simply pure pork.

LOUIS - The Library of Unified Information Sources: A project of the Sunlight Foundation, this search engine combs through seven different sets of government documents. The seven sets of documents are Congressional Reports, the Congressional Record, Congressional Hearings, the Federal Register, Presidential Documents, GAO Reports, and Congressional Bills & Resolutions. The search engine allows users to search broadly for keywords or limit searches to a single document set or range of dates. LOUIS, which updates its document depository daily, even allows users to set up a "standing query" as an RSS feed, to get alerts every time Congress or the executive branch takes action that references the subject of the initial query.

OpenCongress.org: OpenCongress.org is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. It is a free, open-source non-partisan Web resource that makes the activities of Congress more transparent and encourages civic engagement. OpenCongress.org offers RSS feeds as an easy and convenient way to follow the latest developments relating to a bill, a vote or a Member of Congress. The site serves as a rich resource for political bloggers, issue-based membership groups, and individuals looking for a user-friendly way to track Congress and the issues they care about.

The Open House Project: This Sunlight sponsored project is collaborative, bi-partisan and officially endorsed effort by House leadership. It enlisted legislative information experts, non-profit organizers and bloggers to study how the House of Representatives currently integrates the Internet into its operations, and has identified attainable reforms to promote public access to its work and members. It is currently expanding its work to include the U.S. Senate.

Real Time Investigations: This unprecedented open source journalism effort by Sunlight instantaneously reveals the behind-the-scenes research involved in petitioning the federal government to make its information more accessible to citizens, constituents and journalists. Its first major project sheds light on the relationship between Congress and federal agencies by using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to obtain monthly correspondence logs of letters sent by members of Congress to over 100 federal agencies. This information is posted online as soon as it is received, giving citizens and reporters an insider view of the extent to which members of Congress interact with executive branch agencies and what issues command their attention.

What grant-making has the Sunlight Foundation supported?

Since 2006, the Sunlight Foundation has provided approximately $2.2 million in "transparency grants" - that range from a multiyear grant of nearly $900,000 to a mini-grant of $1,600 - to support organizations that are using new "Web 2.0" technology to further our mission of putting information into citizens' hands to increase transparency in Congress.

These grants are provided primarily for the development and enhancement of databases and Web sites that enhance publicly disclosed information on Congress, lobbying and federal contracting or those that provide new information. Our goal is to support groups and individuals who are going beyond the traditional, single-subject public disclosure database and who are interested in using a Web 2.0 model that enables the media, bloggers, and citizens to sift, share and combine information in ways that are useful for them. All of our transparency grants require the organizations and individuals to agree to make their databases available in easily mashable formats.

Some of our major grantees include:

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW): Sunlight funded CREW's Government Documents site - an online, searchable compendium of documents acquired from government agencies through the Freedom of Information Act by CREW, Sunlight, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Project on Government Oversight and Public Citizen. GovernmentDocs.org provides an online review process that enables people across the Internet to review, tag and comment on any of the thousands of pages of these previously obscure government documents. 

FedSpending.org: A Sunlight grant to OMB Watch created a database that tracks recipients of all federal grants and contracts, including where the money is being spent and whether it was competitively bid. This database has already been searched more than six million times.

FollowTheMoney.org: Grants by Sunlight to this premiere source of data on the role of money in state politics features searchable databases tracking the sources and uses of money to influence the executive officials and legislators in all 50 states. This grant helped to create the first APIs for any political money databases.

MAPLight.org: Sunlight grants to MAPLight.org have created a tool that tracks the day by day, vote by vote, impact of political contributions at the federal level. This analysis is based on databases available at www.opensecrets.org and official records from the Library of Congress. The resulting database of bills, voting records, and campaign contributions powers the search engine at MAPLight.org and enables people to see the links between dollars spent and votes cast in Congress.

Metavid: Grants to this project will support an effort to capture, stream, archive and facilitate real-time collective remediation of federal legislative proceedings. Metavid opens up video source footage of House and Senate proceedings for permanent reusable online access, allowing citizens to remix, investigate, and track their representatives in a participant-driven open source archive.

OpenSecrets.org: Sunlight grants and technical assistance provided to the Center for Responsive Politics, the premiere source of data on money in national politics, has enabled the Center vastly to expand the range and accessibility of its data from all federal campaign contributions, PACs, 527s, to lobbyists expenditures and activities, annual congressional financial disclosure, travel and entertainment, and the revolving door between government and industry, vastly increasing the visits and downloads of this information critical to an understanding of the power of the influencers of Congress. In April of 2007 alone, OpenSecrets.org had 6.6 million page views.

A full listing of Sunlight's grants is available here.

How do I apply for a grant?

Before applying, note that we know that there is a large community of people and organizations who are already doing amazing things when it comes to making information about Congress available and accessible. We want to encourage them to go further by digitizing more information to make it searchable more easily and to present it in a truly public-friendly fashion.

We also want to go further than supporting just the traditional subject public disclosure databases. We are mostly interested in supporting those who are interested in using a Web 2.0 model that enables the media, bloggers, and citizens to sift, share and combine this information in ways that are useful for them. The more creative and user-friendly, the better. Remember that "transparency" for members of Congress is the focus of our work. Projects will be judged on how closely they fit with Sunlight's mission of improving the relationship between citizens and their member of Congress through more transparency of information.

The application process for a transparency grant is simple: send a 2-3 page summary of your proposed project, an itemized budget (including the amount requested from Sunlight) and contact information via our contact form. If it fits the criteria above, we'll let you know, and then we'll request more detail. As we make grant-making decisions on a rolling basis, there is no specific deadline.

Sunlight also offers smaller "mini-grants" (of $1,000-$5,000) to fund and implement original ideas, Web sites, tools and blogs that will create a better, more democratic relationship between government and citizens. As a rule, we do not award grants for salaries, but do for technology upgrades. We encourage applications from existing small local nonprofits and Web sites, from offshoots of national groups, from individuals and from informal groups of citizens. To apply, please use our mini-grant application form.

Does the Sunlight Foundation lobby Congress?

In January 2007, the Sunlight Foundation hired a half-time professional lobbyist to represent its interests on Capitol Hill. Sunlight's lobbying activities have revolved around meetings with key House and Senate staff to discuss ways to improve lobbyist reporting and actively promoting transparency legislation. We are also building support for longer-term goals such as legislation or rules changes that would create greater transparency for congressional activities, as well as making lobbyist reporting more timely. To keep up with Sunlight's lobbying, add our Twitter feed to your list.

What are Sunlight's transparency reform goals?

Sunlight advocates for practical reform goals to make Congress more transparent in order to improve the relationship between citizens and their elected officials. Sunlight believes that providing timely online access to information about the Congress and its members will enable citizens and the press to better understand the activities of their lawmakers and the institution, to monitor the interplay between lawmakers and lobbyists, and enable Congress to better police itself.

Sunlight's transparency reform goals are articulated in detail here.

What is the Sunlight Network?

The Sunlight Network, the 501 c(4) partner of the Foundation, is focused on enabling communities of people to come together offline and online and use their creativity and collective power to achieve greater openness from Congress. The Network was launched in August 2006 with the Punch Clock Campaign, a distributed activism campaign that offered citizens a bounty if they could persuade their lawmakers to put their daily schedules on the Internet. Within six weeks, 85 candidates had signed this "Punch Clock Agreement," showing the power of a mix of citizen and paid organizing. As part of the Punch Clock Campaign, Sunlight also developed "Congress in 30 Seconds," the first political "video mix and match" tool, allowing citizens with no media experience to shuffle audio and video to make their own humorous ads about what Congress does with its time.