January brings a bright new year — and eight new Sunlight OpenGov Grants! These open-source projects and tools are opening up data and government information in innovative ways. Check them out below!

• A $10,000 grant to Chesapeake Commons’ Ashtracker.org, to create data input and processing tools to better integrate data (for use by the public) related to groundwater contamination from coal power plant waste.
• A $17,000 grant for the Councilmatic 2.0 project, rebuilding open-source software for searching municipal legislation, plus some new plugins to extend the software.
• A $2,033 grant to the FAA Beneficial Owner Database project, to create a database of owners of U.S.-flag aircraft using FAA data and publicly available sources.
• To mRelief, a grant of $10,000 to build added capacity for a web tool that makes public services information and other data more useful to Chicagoans.
• A $7,000 grant to OpenDisclosure Alabama, a project of Code for America, for a public demonstration publishing the available campaign finance datasets in the state of Alabama, as well as identifying gaps for further analysis.

• For OpenElections Local, a grant of $10,000, to build a pipeline for gathering, analyzing and publishing election data, plus the creation of an API and user documentation.
• A $10,000 grant to the Open WNC project of Carolina Public Press, to improve public data access in under-served communities in Appalachian North Carolina by developing institutional partnerships, creating a government data repository and training journalists and engaged members of the public.
• To the Platform for Scalable Participatory Democracy project, a $10,000 grant to improve software infrastructure and integration for two open-source platforms for democratic organizing and citizen deliberation in local communities.

Congratulations to Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, to whom we granted $10,000 last June, for press coverage of its Contratados project on NPR’s Latino USA.

This round of grants concludes the OpenGov Grants program, which ran from January 2013 to the end of 2014. Should we reopen the OpenGov Grants program, we will announce it on our website.