We are very excited to annouce today that we are expanding our Board of Directors and our Advisory Board, adding some extraordinary people — Esther Dyson, Jimmy Wales, Charles Lewis, Yochai Benkler — to an already distinguished group that includes Craig Newmark and Kim Malone. As Sunlight moves into our second year of operation we are pleased to be joined by some who are most on the cutting edge of technology and investigative journalism.

Esther Dyson (www.edventure.com) has been elected to serve a one-year term on the Board of Directors. Dyson is a leading expert on emerging digital technology and business models. She is the author of “Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age,” (1997) which explores the impact of information technology on people’s lives, and produced the Release 1.0 newsletter for more than 20 years. Currently, she is an active investor in start-ups around the world and blogs for Huffington Post as Release 0.9.

Joining the Advisory Board are:

Jimmy Wales — Wales is the founder of Wikipedia and the founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit corporation that operates Wikipedia and several other wiki projects, including Wiktionary and Wikinews. He is a member and Chairman Emeritus of Wikimedia's Board of Trustees. He is also the co-founder, along with Angela Beesley, of the for-profit company Wikia, Inc.

Charles Lewis — Lewis is the founder and former executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a position he held for 15 years. During his tenure at the Center, Lewis wrote or co-wrote several of the Center's books and studies that systematically track political influence, including The Buying of the President series, The Buying of Congress series, The Corruption Notebooks, and The Cheating of America. Described by the Village Voice as "the Paul Revere of our time," Lewis was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1998. He now is the president of The Fund for Independence in Journalism.

Yochai Benkler — Benkler is the Joseph M. Field '55 Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He is the author, most recently, of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, which examines how new forms of decentralization and networked collaboration could change economy and society.

Wales, Lewis and Benkler join Craig Newmark and Kim Malone on the Sunlight Foundation's advisory board.

Craig Newmark is the customer service representative and founder of the wildly popular craigslist.org, which allows Internet users from all over the world to write and search free classified advertisements. Newmark has a long-standing relationship with the Sunlight Foundation as an informal advisor, and has donated $10,000 to NewAssignment.net, a distributive journalism project headed by New York University professor Jay Rosen, which Sunlight is also supporting.

Kim Malone is the director of online sales and operations for AdSense at Google. In that role, she is responsible for supporting Google's worldwide network of partner publishers. Prior to joining Google, Kim was the CEO and co-founder of Juice Software, a business intelligence start-up based in New York City.