As building blocks for our tools, our APIs are core not only to our work but also to the hundreds of outside applications and services that they power. (Hold up, what are APIs again?) In the past half year, we have taken your feedback and built a prominent API site that’s accessible from the main Sunlight Foundation navigation. The new API section features completely re-written and re-organized documentation, a summary of the status of each API and an interactive query builder to help developers build their requests. We’ve also added real time statistics for our APIs, so anyone can see their aggregate use over time.

Need inspiration? Want to help?

Aside from accessing our APIs, we have also collected real-life examples of our APIs at work– just check out the gallery of projects using our APIs to see just some of the projects that can be built with our data. Then head over to the Community tab to see current data projects that we and other OpenGov-ers are working on. You can filter these projects by ones that need technical help, non-technical help and also projects to inspire. Learn how to join the efforts on standardizing election data, to detailing key relationships between influencers and politicians, to scraping state level spending data and a whole host of other projects. Have a project you want to add? Submit it here.

Want to meet other developers or get connected?

Join us for Sunlight’s hAPI Hour Thursday, Aug 8th from 6pm-8pm at our offices. Come meet other developers and learn more about our APIs and other OpenGov projects (and share a pun or two over beer). Like nerding out at tech events like us? You can find meetups, conferences, hackathons and datafests on our Community Events page. Know of an event happening in your area or want to add your own? We made it easy to submit an event to us and we’ll feature it on the community calendar.

Sharpen your technical skills

Lastly, we love learning and teaching here at Sunlight. We have in-house trainings and even created a training portal for our tools and to learn transparency skills. If you are a new developer, check out Sunlight’s Capitol Words lesson on Codecademy. It’s part of a group of lessons designed to introduce new Python users to APIs. We’re hoping to expand the curriculum to other APIs and programming languages. Interested in learning to use the Sunlight Foundation APIs? Take this poll to tell us what we should tackle next.

Have any questions or comments? Drop us a line at community@sunlightfoundation.com.