We're proud to announce we've been accepted as a mentoring application for the Google Summer of Code 2011.
If you aren't familiar with Google Summer of Code, it is a great opportunity for college students and open source organizations to work together. Google pays students a $5000 stipend in exchange for their work on an eligible project. For more details about the program in general visit the GSoC 2011 website.
This is our third year participating and we're looking forward to another great summer and a new batch of students and projects.
Continue readingCongress App, Present and Future
I just published what will likely be the last update in 2010 for the Congress app for Android. It's a small update that asks upgrading users if they'd consider making a small donation to the Sunlight Foundation, if they've found the app useful.
You can donate through the Android Market by scanning the QR code to the right, or if you want to give more you can donate through the web.
2010 was a great year for the Congress app. Well over 300,000 people have downloaded the app, it's been well reviewed, has been a featured app in the Android Market, and has been featured by T-Mobile and Sprint in their respective channels. Over the course of 2010, we added comprehensive information about bills, voting history, and background notifications for just about everything in the app.
We plan on expanding the Congress app even further for the 112th Congress.
Continue readingGoogle Summer of Code: Open State Project
This post was contributed by one of Sunlight Labs' Google Summer of Code Students, Gabriel Joel Pérez. Gabriel's work is currently being integrated into the core project and the states he has been working on should be available via the Open State Project API later this year. His code is available on github as we work on integration.
Hello! I’m Gabriel, I’m a 4th year student of Computer Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez. This summer I worked as a GSoC student on developing new scapers for the Open State Project. The states I worked on were Colorado, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon and the territory of Puerto Rico. I really enjoyed the whole experience. The work is very fulfilling as coding in Python is always delightful and fun.
Continue readingGoogle Summer Of Code Adds New Goodies To Congress (Android App)
Over the past few months we've had the pleasure of working with several developers through Google's Summer of Code program. One of them is Evelina Vrabie, who has contributed her talents to our Android app (and has done so from across an ocean -- Evelina's based in Romania). She was nice enough to write about the experience, and to tease a few of the features she's been working on for the app.
My name is Evelina Vrabie, and for the last four months I've had a great experience collaborating with Eric Mill on the Congress project for Android, as part of the Google Summer of Code 2010 program. Working for the Sunlight Foundation has been an excellent opportunity for me to learn and grow as a capable Android developer...
Continue readingSummer of Code 2010 Participants
Google has announced the participants for this year's Google Summer of Code, and we're proud to have four excellent students out of a great overall batch of applications.
We'll be posting updates here over the course of the summer on how the projects progress. Even though our students don't wrap up their classes for another few weeks and so the real work won't begin until May we figured we'd go ahead and introduce our four new students and their projects to the community.
Continue readingAnnouncing Our Google Summer of Code 2010 Participation
Yesterday Google announced the accepted organizations for the 2010 Google Summer of Code and Sunlight is honored to be one of the organizations that will be participating this year. This is our second year participating and we're looking forward to this year's batch of students.
If you are interested in applying check out our project ideas page and read on for details.
Continue readingAnnouncing Our Summer of Code 2009 Participants
Yesterday Google announced this years participants in Google Summer of Code <http://socghop.appspot.com/>
_, Google's program that pays students a stipend to work on an open source project during their summer.
This is Sunlight Labs' first year participating and we were extremely grateful to be granted three slots for this summer. Interest definitely exceeded our expectations leaving us with the difficult job of going through a lot of excellent proposals to select our top three applicants. We wish we could have accepted more proposals and hope that some of the students that found out about us through this program will pursue their ideas even though we were not able to accept them at this time.
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