It’s no secret that we’re dataphiles here at Sunlight, or that we want everyone to have access to the underlying data that powers many of our applications. It’s why we’ve always released downloadable data and APIs (application programming interfaces) that support our data products. You can find most (but not all!) of our offerings at http://services.sunlightlabs.com. To use our APIs, you just need to sign up for an API key. You can watch a video of Tom explaining the general idea.

But that page is several years old, and as Sunlight has grown up over the years, our data offerings have gotten more expansive but also more far flung and difficult to keep track of. That’s why we’re re-investing in our data. Coming next year, we’ll be releasing a brand new site with comprehensive and cohesive documentation on all our apis, as well as an interactive query builder. But this is where we need your help.

What can we be doing better?

We use our own APIs to build products, but we need a better sense of how all of you are using (or potentially aren’t using) them. What are we lacking? How can we make them more accessible? What do you wish we had? How can we make the API key signup process better? How can we improve the feedback loop from developer to maintainer? What languages are you using to access our APIs? Do our language specific API wrappers need to be better maintained?

Please let us know your thoughts, and sound off in the comments!

Happy Holidays!