This year was unlike any other, and Sunlight's work making government transparent and accountable is more important than ever.
Continue readingImproving how citizens email Congress with smart illustrations
Last summer, Sunlight created a feature that allowed you to email your lawmakers as easily as a friend. One year later, we are still improving it by creating new illustrations to enhance the experience.
Continue readingWe Have a Winner!
Last week we celebrated our billionth API call by announcing a giveaway, and Tuesday we went ahead and pulled the name of a random API user who had made at least one successful query. I've been emailing with him since, and am please so say that Matt Gabrenya is our winner! You can find his Github profile here, and his business site, Boston TechCollective, here.
Matt used our APIs to power his BillTrack project, which aims to make it easier to run advocacy campaigns on issues like SOPA and the Keystone XL pipeline.
We're delighted that Matt found our APIs useful, and thrilled that thousands of you have as well. We're going to keep making them better, deeper and more powerful; we're counting on all of you to put them to good use.
What’s New in the Sunlight Congress API
In January, Sunlight [released a new Congress API](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sunlightlabs/r-evxgtFXRw). It's been a huge help to [our own products](http://congress.sunlightfoundation.com/), and seen a great deal of use by the community (such as today's [DefundTheNSA campaign](http://defundthensa.com/)). In the time since, we've released some new data, some new developer-friendly features, and seen lots of community contribution. Here's what's been added over the last few months:
Continue readingBuilding a Digital Unconference
With the dust finally settling from TransparencyCamp, it's a good time to talk about some of the work we did this time around to prepare for one of our favorite weekends of the year. TCamp '13 was a year of firsts for us: our first 500+ crowd, first time running the event with a mostly volunteer staff, and our first time trying to run nearly everything digitally and online. In this post I'll run through the what/why/how of that last point, and touch on some lessons learned. It's gonna be long and Django-centric, so grab your pink pony mug and cozy up with a cup of coffee.
Continue readingThe 12 Days of APIs
‘Tis the season for application programming interfaces. Sunlight is in a festive mood. Not only are we hosting a pretty... View Article
Continue readingCheck Out the Open States Beta Site
If you don't read the Sunlight Labs blog as religiously as I do (you should!), you might miss that our Open States project now has a public beta site up and running.
Continue readingTools for Transparency: Using Python for government transparency
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the... View Article
Continue readingOpenGovernment Minnesota Launches Today
Residents of Minnesota now have a new way to keep track of what’s happening in their state with the launch... View Article
Continue readingAnnouncing Sarah’s Inbox
Today the Sunlight Foundation is proud to unveil Sarah's Inbox, our attempt to make Sarah Palin's recently released email records easier to use with a searchable function and an interface similar to Gmail.
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