Projects
Check out Sunlight's noteworthy work.
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Money Business
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Poligraft is a website and utility that allows anyone to uncover levels of influence in federal and state-level politics and the news coverage of it. Using data from Sunlight’s Influence Explorer, Poligraft allows you to connect the dots between money and politics in Congress. Simply paste the URL or text of a news article, blog post or press release and Poligraft will create an enhanced view of the people, organizations and relationships described within it.
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Party Time documents the Congressional Fundraising Circuit. From the early morning hours until late at night, there are opportunities for members of Congress and congressional candidates to meet with supporters behind closed doors, press them for money, and party. Breakfasts, luncheons, barbecues, golfing outings, receptions, concerts, basketball, baseball, football—the social whirl is endless.
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Clearspending is a scorecard that analyzes how well U.S. government agencies are reporting their spending data on USASpending.gov. Clearspending is the most thorough analysis of this federal grant and loan data ever conducted.
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Influence Explorer connects the dots of political contributions on the federal and state level allowing you to track influence by lawmaker, company or prominent individual.
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Inbox Influence is a new tool from the Sunlight Foundation that allows you to see the political contributions of the people and organizations that are mentioned in emails you receive. This easy-to-use tool can be used for researching influence background on corporate correspondence, adding context to emailed articles or discovering who is behind political fundraising solicitations.
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Checking Influence shows you how companies you do business with every day are wielding political influence. By securely analyzing your online bank or credit card statement, Checking Influence shows your spending alongside corporate spending on lobbying activities and campaign contributions, helping you to be a more informed consumer and citizen.
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The Low-down on Congress
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Stream Congress is a comprehensive web app that compiles, in real time, all Tweets, YouTube videos and floor updates from members of Congress into a single customizable information newsfeed.
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Politiwidgets makes inserting information on a Member of Congress into a blog post as easy as embedding a YouTube video. We have 10 free widgets can help you display lawmakers' top campaign contributors, earmarks they have requested, their voting record on any current bill, where their fundraisers are, along with many others.
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Open Congress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage, social networking, public participation tools, and more to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress. OpenCongress is a free, open-source, not-for-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement.
* Sunlight provides grant support to the Participatory Politics Foundation for this site. Visit site -
The House Staff Directory empowers the public to better communicate with their elected representatives by making available staff names and (public) phone numbers and addresses. In addition to legislative offices, the directory also includes staffers from offices that support House activities. It is no secret that congressional staff are the lifeblood of Congress, but identifying the best staffer to speak with about a particular issue is a daunting challenge.
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Reporting Projects
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Lobbyist Registration Tracker, is a database which allows user to see lobbying registrations as they're submitted and the trends in issues and registrations over time.
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Follow the Unlimited Money, a product of the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group, is a searchable database tracking organizations that are paying for ads and other forms of political communication.
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Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker digitizes information that representatives of foreign governments, political parties and government-controlled entities must disclose to the U.S. Justice Department when they seek to influence U.S. policy.
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Sunlight Campaign Ad Monitor allows anyone to report information on the political advertising they see on TV, hear on the radio or view online.
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House Expenditure Database On November 30, 2009, the US House of Representatives released the quarterly Statement of Disbursements online for the first time. Since the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer posted these in PDF format, Sunlight created a searchable database of each House member's expenditures. This database contains information that is a subset of the information provided in the PDFs.
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Keeping Tabs on Government
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Capitol Words, explores the most popular words and phrases used by legislators in the U.S. Congress. Search the data from 1996 to today by state, date or politician.
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Subsidyscope, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts, is revealing information on subsidies by building the most comprehensive source for subsidy data available. The compiled information will stimulate a more vigorous and informed debate about the full scope of federal subsidies and help policy makers make smart choices.
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Operation Transbearency is no accident. It’s a movement when the folks at Sunlight heard that the infamous faux-pundit Stephen Colbert decided to take his message of Politics As Usual to Washington, DC on October 30th. His mission? A march to Keep Fear Alive. Rather than feed into his fear-mongering, Sunlight decided it was time to stand up to Colbert by hitting him where it hurts: his fear of bears.
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Read the Bill is a platform for strengthening our democracy by ensuring elected officials and citizens have the chance to read and understand legislation.
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OpenGovernment, a sibling site of OpenCongress, brings together official state government data with news and blog coverage, social networking, public participation tools and more to give you the real story behind what’s happening in local government.
* Sunlight provides grant support to the Participatory Politics Foundation for this site. Visit site
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Transparency Corps allows anyone anywhere to have a positive impact on making our government more transparent by aggregating small actions that require human intelligence but not specialized political knowledge.
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The Open State Project gathers legislative data directly from state legislatures, and makes that data available in a common format for use by anyone.The Open State Project data powers our site, OpenGovernment.org. Join our Google Group to get involved.
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Sunlight Live, winner of the 2010 Knight-Batten Grand Prize, is Sunlight's interactive, real-time investigative reporting platform. During major congressional hearings and news events, we stream live coverage combined with relevant transparency data about the influences on elected officials, while engaging an online audience.
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PublicMarkup lets you review and comment on proposed bills before they're introduced—or while they're pending—in Congress.
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Roku Open Government Apps stream audio-visual content from the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court to any Roku player. The White House app offers high quality, live and archived video from WhiteHouse.gov, the Congress app streams video from the U.S. House of Representatives floor and the Supreme Court app is an audio archive of arguments and opinions issued and read by justices browseable by year.
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Mobile Apps
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Real Time Congress is the fast and free way to access real-time information about Congress on your iPhone.
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Congress for Android is the fast and free way to access real-time information about Congress on your android phone.
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Congress for Windows Phone 7 is the fast and free way to access real-time information about Congress on your Windows phone.
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Sunlight Health for Android and iPhone brings health data to consumers’ pockets. The app helps medical patients and their families make informed decisions about healthcare services and prescription drug options. It is part of Sunlight’s National Data Apps, developed with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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