We received more than a dozen fascinating entries to Sunlight's first Web 2.0 Mashup Contest in 2007. Each entry proved the case for more transparency in Congress and the creativity of American citizens if provided access to data.

Unfluence Wins!

Skye Bender-deMoll and Greg Michalec will receive the $2,000 prize for Unfluence, a web program that generates interactive network maps of state level political contribution data. (screencast)

Unfluence won a close vote count from our judges Esther Dyson, Craig Newmark, and Jimmy Wales. Unfluence uses campaign finance data compiled by the National Institute on Money and State Politics and made available through its powerful API which was written by NIMSP's Director of Technology Mike Krejci with funding from Sunlight. (Compiled campaign finance data for Congress is not yet available via API, but we expect that to change soon.)

Skye Bender-deMoll is a researcher and consultant on dynamic networks and visualization. His work centers around building tools and techniques for cleaning, exploring and analyzing complicated relational data-sets that evolve over time. He is the author of skyeome.net, a blog that publicizes political network related research.

Greg Michalec is a freelance web developer from Oakland, CA. If he’s not glued in front of his laptop, you'll likely find him either doing radical legal work with the Midnight Special Law Collective, playing his sax with the Brass Liberation Orchestra, or taking a bicycle adventure

The Finalists

CityCon (First Runner Up)
CityCon allows you to find detailed information about any member of the current 110th U.S. Congress.
Screencast  Live Mashup

OpenHearings Live (Second Runner Up)
A mini-site of schedules for current and future Senate committee hearings. Includes links to live audio and video of hearings in progress, an RSS feed of live hearings, iCalendar schedules for all committees and hearings, and the ability to import the "Live Hearing" view into your personalized Google homepage.
Screencast  Live Mashup

EchoDitto's Congressional Similarity Visualizer
Java applet that lets users explore which legislators vote most similarly to one another. (Detailed explanation on the site provides background on the statistical analysis the visualization represents.)
Screencast  Live Mashup

Second Life Congressional Info
A mashup of the Sunlight APIs with Second Life, creating an interactive info center (kiosk) at the virtual Capitol Hill - a pro-bono educational area - in Second Life. Visitors can (and do!) access the information in a venue where they can discuss the information in the context of politics, policy and place.
Screencast  Creator's writeup

State-Machine
Data Visualization showing the relationship between members of Congress and political access committees. (Watching screencast and reading description highly recommended.)
Screencast  Live Mashup

Additional Entries

Congrelicious
Combines OpenCongress.org with del.icio.us through a Firefox plug-in that both adds material and enables the process of associating bookmarks in del.icio.us with OpenCongress entities. Here is the website:
Live Mashup

Map of Congressional Co-sponsors for HR 676
A map for co-sponsors for HR 676
Live Mashup

Where A Bill Becomes a Law
The site is essentially a clone of Google's driving directions, except instead of steps to a destination, it shows the path of a piece of legislature through Congress (and the President). It is meant to be fun and educational.
Live Mashup

US BillHop
The site updates the status of legislation daily from the Library of Congress site and allows users to contribute additional information on bills and issues using its multiple wiki tools.
Live Mashup

eGovy Mobile (EGM)
eGovy Mobile (EGM) is a WAP 2.0 site that mashes 5 different sources of congressional data into one efficient wireless presentation. (Can be viewed on most cell phones and pdas. - If you do not have a cell phone or pda handy, you can view it through the online Mobi Emulator at: http://emulator.mtld.mobi)
Live Mashup

No Child Left Behind
A mashup that combines information on standardized tests and funding for education under the No Child Left Behind Act to show how money is spent on the district and state levels. This mashup aims to better inform funding needs, the adequacy of a state's education system and to show how fairly federal education dollars are distributed.
Live Mashup

Directory of Congress
A user-friendly directory of contact information organized by State & District or by ZIP Code based on the SunlightLabs API.
Live Mashup

Who is My Represenative
Here you can look up your representation in the U.S. government. Simply enter your zip code or zip+4 (for better results) and information on your representation in Congress will be returned.
Live Mashup

Contest Resources:
This contest was inspired by the explosion of simple mashups in the last year, and Sunlight's commitment to using new tools to make Congress more transparent. The Sunlight Labs resources page includes links to API, Data sources, and examples.

We hope individuals will be inspired by the above examples, will use them, and will create more!

Questions? Comments? Let us know