Sunlight Foundation

Washington, DC –The Sunlight Labs, Sunlight Foundation’s open source development team, is organizing the hundreds of developers in its community, and the public at large, to collaboratively bid on the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board’s request for proposals (RFP) to build Recovery.gov. Through its blog, wiki, listserve and Internet chat room, the Sunlight Labs is leading the discussion on how to build a new Recovery.gov site. The RFP, which Sunlight obtained on Tuesday afternoon, is due June 26.

In a blog post blog post, Sunlight’s Clay Johnson outlined how Sunlight will organize the community crowdsourced proposal, which he posted online.

“On Tuesday afternoon, someone handed us a copy of the Recovery.gov 2.0 RFP and we thought: what if we try something truly radical here,” said Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs. “What if we opened up the process of government contracting by bidding and allowed anyone to edit our proposal online? We together—not just we meaning the Sunlight Foundation—are going to bid on redoing Recovery.gov to learn more about the process of government contracting, and to try and build what is perhaps the biggest federal transparency-related Web site.”

Although not a formal government contractor, Sunlight is experimenting with the request for proposals as a way to draw attention to the need for more transparency about the way the federal government allocates spending for its technological needs. The collaborative effort can also create standards for the public to judge the effectiveness of Recovery.gov Web site and to demonstrate how the Internet can help democratize the government contractor bidding process.

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.
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