The new organization can raise and spend unlimited amounts in elections without needing to tip-toe around the tax rules that govern so-called social welfare nonprofit organizations.
Continue reading3 bills that could make 2015 a landmark year for open data in California
California's transparency movement is looking strong! Its legislature is considering several open data bills that would increase the amount of information accessible to the public.
Continue readingJoin Sunlight at PyCon 2015
Catch Sunlight at PyCon 2015 in Montreal — and help us build a new army of scrapers to collect data about political influence at all levels of government.
Continue readingSunlight’s International Lobbying Disclosure Guidelines, now available in Spanish
Sunlight is happy to announce that our International Lobbying Disclosure Guidelines are now available in Spanish!
Continue readingLessons from DotGov Design Conference: How to merge government and good design
Last Friday, the Sunlight design team played hooky and attended the DotGov Design Conference, leaving with new ideas that sparked great dialogue and new challenges.
Continue readingThe Week on Politwoops: Deletions deserve an explanation
Politwoops, Sunlight's archive of deleted tweets from politicians, exposes how some lawmakers are stubborn when pressed to discuss removed messaging, no matter how trivial.
Continue readingRedesign is awful, but USASpending still proves power of the public
The latest iteration of USASpending.gov, which combines all the virtues of clunky design with the frustrations of diminished functionality, is a reminder for this writer of the early days of the Sunlight Foundation.
Continue readingTravel in the shadows: House reports omit key spending details
For years, the U.S. House of Representatives has published fewer details about how members spent taxpayer dollars than the law specifies.
Continue readingOpening criminal justice data: What we learned from Louisiana
While Louisiana fails at reporting criminal justice data on the state level, it succeeds at doing so on the municipal level, making it an extraordinary case study of the complexities of state criminal justice data.
Continue readingMaking SublimeLinter work with rbenv and rubocop
Linting your code reveals syntactical errors and deviations from accepted stylistic conventions, and — as someone that switches between languages a lot — I heartily recommend it.
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