Sunlight opened its doors for business less than a year ago. In our first year, we focused on planting lots of seeds: identifying key assets in the existing public interest community and assisting them in building up their web infrastructure and getting their data resources out of silos and facing outward onto the web; investing in the development of several major new data-sets that are filling in missing elements of the money-influence-accountability nexus; creating or partnering in the creation of whole new sites and tools that are geared to make this data more accessible and more widely distributed across the web as a platform; reaching out to and establishing working relationships with likeminded individuals and organizations around the country; experimenting with new ways of engaging the public in fostering transparency; and beginning a conversation with Members of and candidates for Congress about being more open and transparent.

Wow! The 2006 International Weblog Awards are out, and Sunlight's been named the "Best Blog" in the world, by an international panel of thirteen bloggers! The competition, nicknamed Best of the Blogs (BOB) is organized by German broadcasting company Deutche-Welle. The panel judged thousands of blogs on the basis of their "prose, creativity, design, and user friendliness."

According to the contest organizers, "During a day-long conference, the BOBs jury members said they admired the Sunlight Foundation's work to increase transparency in government and called the project a positive example of how blogs can shape political discourse. The watchblog was also praised for its potential to be adapted for use in other countries."

In less than 2 days, over a holiday weekend, YOU have completed the research on the first step of our first major distributed research assignment -- Congress's Family Business. While we still have to verify the work, it appears that 16 current lawmakers are employing spouses in their campaigns. We'll be back to you as soon as we can with our final calculations!(we might even break some news with this.) No doubt, Bill will check in later in the day with some more of the details -- like how many folks participated in the project, etc.

So much for what people here in Washington say about the cynicism of the public! Anyone who believes that citizens don't want to get involved in monitoring what their representiatives do here in Washington has just been proven wrong.

Last week Sunlight launched a free promotional service for bloggers -- and diarists on their sites -- who are writing about what's going on in Congress. Our goal is to help bring attention to bloggers and the wisdom of the crowds who are flocking to these sites, particularly those sites that have yet to be discovered by the MSM.

While we are doing our best to monitor the blogoshere, to really make this work, bloggers and their readers have to let us know what they are writing about. So if you are a blogger, or just an avid reader of one, and you know of posts about members of Congress -- information that brings to light news about a Member of Congress that his or her constituents should know -- send us the link!  We're specifically interested in information about ties between lawmakers and lobbyists, questions about Members' relationships with fundraisers or special interests, and examples of lawmakers going to bat for local special interests that remain below the radar screen of the mainstream news media. No one knows their own Congressperson the way local bloggers do.