Sunlight Foundation

WASHINGTON, DC-The Sunlight Labs, Sunlight Foundation’s open source development community, has announced that “Filibusted” won the grand prize of $15,000 in Sunlight’s Apps for America government mashup contest. Filibusted, created by Andrew Dupont, uses data from GovTrack.us to track Senate votes, and highlights which senators use parliamentary procedures to block votes on legislation.

The $5,000 second prize went to “Legistalker," a site created by a team from Forum One Communications that tracks news, Twitter, YouTube and other online activity by and about members of Congress. Sunlight awarded the third prize to four sites including, “Hello Congress," "Know Thy Congressman," "Yeas & Nays" and "e-Paper Trail." Additionally, 10 entries received honorable mentions.

“Judging our first Apps for America contest was difficult,” said Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs. “We received more than 40 solid, open source applications that moved the ball forward to open up government information and provide new methods of communicating with our legislative branch. Every entry presented showed an amazing commitment on behalf of the developer community to open their government.”

Apps for America awarded developers for best applications based on data from Sunlight and its partners that makes Congress more accountable, interactive and transparent. Entrants were required to use a host of government information APIs or datasets, including the Sunlight Labs API, OpenSecrets.org API, the FollowtheMoney.org API, the Capitol Words API and other Sunlight APIs and datasets. Sunlight also encouraged contestants to use Sunlight’s code libraries, which the Labs recently open sourced.

Apps for America entries were judged by Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategyLabs (Corbett collaborated with the Washington, DC CTO Vivek Kundra in a mashup contest using DC government data); EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty (who is also co-founder of the Django open source framework); Aaron Swartz, director of Watchdog.net (and a founder of Reddit.com) and Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs.

Sunlight sponsored this contest to encourage more programmers to leverage public data and connect different information sources to effectively convey information about politicians and Congress. It was inspired by the Sunlight's commitment to using new tools to make Congress more transparent.

The Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan nonprofit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency. Visit SunlightFoundation.com to learn more about Sunlight’s projects, including The Open Senate Project, Capitol Words and OpenCongress.
###