Congratulations to our good friends over at techPresident for winning the 2007 Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism Grand Prize. The University of Maryland-affiliated J-Lab organized the award. Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, Sunlight’s technology advisors, founded techPresident to focus on how the campaigns are using the web, and how the web is using them. They are encouraging ordinary citizens to be their own Woodsteins, covering the candidates using all the new tools of the new web. The site covers campaign websites, online advertising, and postings on YouTube and has a must-read group blog and daily digest. Their tracking of which candidate has the fastest growing group of friends on MySpace and Facebook supporters has become a political bellweather.

Andrew and Micah have collected a couple dozen veterans of the 2004 and 2006 elections, both Republicans and Democrats, to blog on the site. This powerhouse stable includes the likes of Patrick Ruffini, former eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee and webmaster for Bush-Cheney ‘04; Zack Exley , director of online organizing and communications for Kerry/Edwards ‘04; Morra Aarons, former director of Internet marketing for the DNC, and Chuck DeFeo, general manager of Townhall.com.

Micah and Andrew and the rest of the (very small) techPresident team are the innovators of the ongoing mashup of politics and Web 2.0. As the campaign heats up, techPresident will increasingly be an essential resource for journalists and average citizens alike. Congratulations guys!

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You read a lot here about Web 2.0 on the Sunlight blog, and hopefully see it practiced too. So now read this column by our senior strategic team — Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry of Personal Democracy Consultants — on Politics 2.0. It appeared yesterday in the new multimedia platform The Politico.com. And while you're at it, check out our new Sunlight Labs Blog.

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In the rush to our launch this coming Wednesday – stay tuned for how to call in to our telephonic press conference – I want to just take a moment to reflect on the extraordinary amount of strategic thinking and planning and real work product that has been undertaken in the 4 months since the Sunlight Foundation was incorporated. What we will be announcing on Wednesday – the awarding of grants to create new databases and our discussions about how to mash information together to make it even more robust, the launching of a Congresspedia, establishing three new blogs, our initial efforts in distributive journalism and on-line tutorials – is work that might have taken another organization a year to put together! Kudos to all of us.

But kudos especially to two key consultants to Sunlight – Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej. Micah and I have known each other since my days at Public Campaign where he served as a senior communications fellow. Andrew and I met later, and we always harbored an interest in collaborating in something big down the road. Sunlight is it!

Two years ago Andrew and Micah insisted that I come to the first Personal Democracy Forum conference (their third one will be held on May 15^th in NY.) It was literally an eye-opening experience.  Andrew founded the Personal Democracy Forum as a venue to explore the intersection of the world of politics and technology. Micah is its co-founder. Read their bios.

They have an extraordinary range of experience and they are, quite simply, extraordinary colleagues. Without them, what we hope will be Sunlight’s cutting edge approach to the uses of technology, would have been a longer time in coming, or perhaps, not even part of our plans.

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