New Technology Grants Awarded to Sunlight Foundation
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 30, 2011
Contact: Liz Bartolomeo 202-742-1520 x226
WASHINGTON, DC – The Sunlight Foundation announced today nearly $560,000 in new contributions and grants received to advance our work in opening and digitizing legislative and government influence data.
“These generous gifts are testament to the philanthropic community’s commitment in recognizing how technology can help shine light on our government and support greater civic engagement across the country,” said Ellen Miller, co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation.
New contributions include:
$300,000 – Rita Allen Foundation
The grant will allow for Sunlight’s Open States Project (http://openstates.org/) to achieve its goal in collecting legislative data from the legislatures of all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico and making it available online in a unified, open source, developer-friendly format. The funds will also support a website for public use.
$100,000 – Mark Cuban – entrepreneur, chairman of HDNet and owner of the Dallas Mavericks
The entrepreneur’s donation is directed toward general support.
$93,077 – The Stanton Foundation
The grant will support Sunlight Labs in creating real-time “Google Alerts for public policy.” The web tool will track keywords in the Congressional Record and from state legislation. More information about the project is available on the Labs Blog.
$60,000 – The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
The grant is for the development of open-source software that shows patterns of influence of public comments in the Federal Register. The Sunlight Reporting Group used an early-version of this technology to review financial regulation rule-makings in September.
Sunlight is supported through contributions from foundations, including Omidyar Network and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, co-founder Mike Klein and other individuals. Visit SunlightFoundation.com for a full overview of how we are funded.
The Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan non-profit that uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Visit http://SunlightFoundation.com to learn more about Sunlight’s projects, including http://PoliticalPartyTime.org and http://influenceexplorer.com.
###
