Sunlight Foundation
Encyclopedia
The Sunlight Foundation is a 501(c)(3) education
Education
Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...

al organization
Organization
An organization is a social group which distributes tasks for a collective goal. The word itself is derived from the Greek word organon, itself derived from the better-known word ergon - as we know `organ` - and it means a compartment for a particular job.There are a variety of legal types of...

 founded in April 2006 with the goal of increasing transparency and accountability
Accountability
Accountability is a concept in ethics and governance with several meanings. It is often used synonymously with such concepts as responsibility, answerability, blameworthiness, liability, and other terms associated with the expectation of account-giving...

 in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 government
Government
Government refers to the legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in the administrative bureaucracy who control a state at a given time, and to the system of government by which they are organized...

.
The foundation encourages citizen and blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

ger participation by aggregating existing information and digitizing new information as well as advocating for policy changes to build a more open government.

A PBS
Public Broadcasting Service
The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

 article quoted the Washington Examiner
Washington Examiner
The Washington Examiner is a free daily newspaper published in Springfield, Virginia, and distributed in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. It is owned by Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz....

's editorial page editor, Mark Tapscott, saying that "On the key point of bringing the federal government into the digital age and thereby vastly increasing its transparency and accountability, I think Sunlight is doing more good things on a wider front than anybody has ever before done."

Founding

The Sunlight Foundation was founded by Ellen S. Miller
Ellen S. Miller
Ellen S. Miller an American political activist with extensive work in the fields of politics and money. As an advocate for Open Government, Miller promotes the use of technology to increase transparency in government, and co-founded both the Sunlight Foundation as well as its sister organization,...

 and Michael R. Klein because of concerns about the influence of money and relationships, as well as a fear of corruption
Political corruption
Political corruption is the use of legislated powers by government officials for illegitimate private gain. Misuse of government power for other purposes, such as repression of political opponents and general police brutality, is not considered political corruption. Neither are illegal acts by...

 in the Congress. In an October 2006 CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...

 poll, half of all Americans believed most members of Congress were corrupt, and more than a third believed their own representative was crooked, both numbers up from the beginning of that year. Furthermore, sixty-one percent of voters said they expected inaccurate results because of technical glitches, while two-thirds said it was likely that hackers or political operatives would prevent the machines from producing an accurate count. The Sunlight Foundation was launched in April 2006 with a $
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....

3.5 million contribution from co-founder Michael R. Klein, a securities lawyer.

History

With a dream of 'one-click political influence disclosure' the Sunlight Foundation launched Sunlight Labs in May 2006 to gather the power of developers and designers for transparency projects. In addition to building all the projects that the Sunlight Foundation produces, Sunlight Labs serves as a community of more than 1,500 who discuss and build on ideas to improve government openness. Notable Sunlight Labs projects include the National Data Catalog that indexes government datasets, Poligraft that pulls campaign contribution data out of any body of text, and contests to encourage innovation through government data. Apps for America began in 2009 to spur developers to build applications on top of open data and continued with a second contest in 2010 building on the newly launched Data.gov
Data.gov
Data.gov is a U.S. government website launched in late May 2009 by the then Federal Chief Information Officer of the United States, Vivek Kundra....

.

In June 2006 the Sunlight Foundation reported on Dennis Hastert
Dennis Hastert
John Dennis "Denny" Hastert was the 59th Speaker of the House serving from 1999 to 2007. He represented as a Republican for twenty years, 1987 to 2007.He is the longest-serving Republican Speaker in history...

's fraud
Fraud
In criminal law, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual; the related adjective is fraudulent. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and also a civil law violation...

ulent real estate investments, the first major story for the organization.

In January 2007 the Sunlight Foundation launched the collaborative Open House Project to identify opportunities for Congress to embrace online tools. The project successfully encouraged Congress to adopt more flexible member websites, better committee information, more video content and xml
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

 versions of votes.

In February 2007 the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation launched OpenCongress.org, a site to track full text of legislation and build a community to better follow congressional activities. BoingBoing described the site as 'ripping open the doors to Congress with Web 2.0' and as of January 2010 the site is operated solely by the Participatory Politics Foundation, though the Sunlight Foundation continues to be the primary supporter of the project.

In April 2007 the Sunlight Foundation started Real Time Investigations blog, now known as the Reporting Group, to document the process of investigative reporting and the difficulties of obtaining government information. Notable projects include the Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker, SubsidyScope and Political Party Time.

In October 2007 the Sunlight Foundation joined the Taxpayers for Common Sense
Taxpayers for Common Sense
Taxpayers for Common Sense is a nonpartisan federal budget watchdog organization based in Washington, D.C. in the United States. TCS is a 501 non-profit organization; its 501 affiliate is Taxpayers for Common Sense Action . The current president of TCS is Ryan Alexander...

 to launch EarmarkWatch.org that asked citizens to research over 3,000 earmarks
Earmark (politics)
In United States politics, an earmark is a legislative provision that directs approved funds to be spent on specific projects, or that directs specific exemptions from taxes or mandated fees...

 and identify the sponsors and recipients.

In 2008, the Open House Project expanded to a project called Public Markup to crowdsource a comprehensive package of government transparency legislation. The outcome of the project served as a framework for numerous introductions of transparency legislation
Legislation
Legislation is law which has been promulgated by a legislature or other governing body, or the process of making it...

 over the years, including H.R. 4983 - The Transparency in Government Act of 2010 that was brought to the floor by Representative Michael Quigley (D-Illinois, 5th)
Michael Quigley
Michael "Mike" Quigley is the U.S. Representative for , serving since the April 7, 2009 special election. He is a member of the Democratic Party. Quigley is a former member of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, where he represented Chicago's northside neighborhoods of Lakeview, Uptown and...

.

Earlier in 2009, the Sunlight Foundation held the first annual Transparency Camp, an unconference
Unconference
An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term "unconference" has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees, sponsored presentations, and top-down organization...

 where open government advocates met to discuss problems and solutions with government data. The Washington Post called the event in 2010 "the place to be" to leverage technologies to build stronger democracies.

In July 2009 the Sunlight Foundation received the Public Access to Government Information Award from the American Association of Law Libraries
American Association of Law Libraries
The American Association of Law Libraries "is a nonprofit educational organization with over 5,000 members nationwide. AALL's mission is to promote and enhance the value of law libraries to the legal and public communities, to foster the profession of law librarianship, and to provide leadership in...

 'in recognition of their outstanding efforts to promote government openness and accountability through the use of cutting-edge technologies.'

In March 2010, the Sunlight Foundation announced the Design for America contest to encourage visualizations to make complex government information more understandable to citizens.

In July 2010, the Sunlight Foundation won the grand prize of the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism for their Sunlight Live project that incorporates streaming video, liveblogging, social networking and data presentation.

In September 2010, the Sunlight Foundation unveiled a project called ClearSpending that analyzed how well government agencies were reporting their spending data on USASpending.gov. It found that $1.3 trillion in federal reporting data was inaccurately reported in 2009. The Sunlight Foundation testified twice before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the project and the report was updated in September 2011 to include continued 2010 data inaccuracies.

In August 2011, the Sunlight Foundation launched a series of applications for Roku players
Roku
Roku , is an American, privately held, consumer electronics company that sells home digital media products. The Company is based in Saratoga, California.- Company profile and products :...

 that enables users to watch live and archived content from Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court.

Congress, Android and Windows Phone app

Congress is a free congressional directory for phones running the Android and Windows Phone
Windows Phone
Windows Phone is a mobile operating system developed by Microsoft, and is the successor to its Windows Mobile platform, although incompatible with it. Unlike its predecessor, it is primarily aimed at the consumer market rather than the enterprise market...

 operating system. Using the Sunlight Labs API, it shows up-to-date info about members of Congress, and adds updates from members' Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

 and YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

 accounts.

Real Time Congress, iPhone app

Real Time Congress is a free application to access real-time information about Congress on an iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...

. It puts the actions, meetings and documents that make up the legislative process into the iPhone mobile interface.

Sunlight Health, Android and iPhone app

Sunlight Health is a free application to look up healthcare services, medical suppliers and prescription drugs. Using data from government and nonprofit institutions the app shows government ratings of hospitals and nursing homes, nearby locations to purchase home medical supplies and research on various prescription drug options.

Sunlight Foundation board

  • Michael R. Klein, Chairman
  • Ellen S. Miller, Secretary and Treasurer
  • Esther Dyson
    Esther Dyson
    Esther Dyson is a former journalist and Wall Street technology analyst who is a leading angel investor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and commentator focused on breakthrough innovation in healthcare, government transparency, digital technology, biotechnology, and space...

    , EDventure Holdings
  • Matt Halprin, Omidyar Network
    Omidyar Network
    Omidyar Network is a philanthrocapitalist investment firm established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam. To date, Omidyar Network has committed more than $290 million to for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations that foster economic advancement and encourage individual...

  • Craig Newmark
    Craig Newmark
    Craig Alexander Newmark is an Internet entrepreneur best known for being the founder of the San Francisco-based international website Craigslist.-Biography:...

    , Craigslist
    Craigslist
    Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities featuring free online classified advertisements, with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums....

  • Nicholas J. Klein

Advisory board

  • Yochai Benkler
    Yochai Benkler
    Yochai Benkler is an Israeli-American professor of Law and author. Since 2007, he has been the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.- Biography :In 1984, Benkler...

    , Harvard University
    Harvard University
    Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

  • Mitch Kapor
    Mitch Kapor
    Mitchell David Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3. He is also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the first chair of the Mozilla Foundation...

  • Lawrence Lessig
    Lawrence Lessig
    Lawrence "Larry" Lessig is an American academic and political activist. He is best known as a proponent of reduced legal restrictions on copyright, trademark, and radio frequency spectrum, particularly in technology applications, and he has called for state-based activism to promote substantive...

    , Harvard University
    Harvard University
    Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

  • Charles Lewis
    Charles Lewis (journalist)
    Charles Lewis is an investigative journalist based in Washington D.C. since 1977. Charles Lewis founded the Center for Public Integrity and three other nonprofit organizations and is currently the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University School of...

    , former director, Center for Public Integrity
    Center for Public Integrity
    The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit organization dedicated to producing original, responsible investigative journalism on issues of public concern. The Center is non-partisan and non-advocacy and committed to transparent and comprehensive reporting both in the United States and around...

  • Kim Scott
  • Jimmy Wales
    Jimmy Wales
    Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....

    , Wikipedia
    Wikipedia
    Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...


External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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