Today, Sunlight is announcing new Mini-Grants as part of its commitment to support original ideas, tools, Web sites, and bloggers that further our mission of using the Internet to foster a more open government.

These new projects (scroll down for our Mini-Grantees) demonstrate the creativity of citizens in using the Internet to give the public the power to learn more about their elected representatives and to engage as communities in monitoring, conversing and connecting over the work of Congress. Each of the work of these new Sunlight grantees creates greater transparency for our elected officials. Their work will strengthen citizen participation in the democratic process.

Check out the work of Geocoder.us that provides free address look-up information based on the U.S. Census, so that users can enter any address or intersection and learn the longitude and latitude coordinates for that location, or the work of Knowledge As Power which will develop a legislator email management and constituent relations communications system to increase transparency between legislators and their constituents. Speechology.org will host a Web site that will archive video of key political speeches-including debates, State of the Union addresses, convention speeches congressional testimony and campaign advertisements-and facilitate online public critical analysis. And three additional grants — Pacific Northwest Topic Hotlist, Richmond Sunlight and the Utah News Aggregator — have developed innovative ways to create more transparency for their legislators closer to home.

We are very excited to be supporting all of these groups.

Sunlight accepts applications for its Mini-Grants on an ongoing basis.