Today, Sunlight is announcing new Mini-Grants as part of its commitment to support original ideas, tools, Web sites, and bloggers that further our mission of using the Internet to foster a more open government.

These new projects (scroll down for our Mini-Grantees) demonstrate the creativity of citizens in using the Internet to give the public the power to learn more about their elected representatives and to engage as communities in monitoring, conversing and connecting over the work of Congress. Each of the work of these new Sunlight grantees creates greater transparency for our elected officials. Their work will strengthen citizen participation in the democratic process.

Check out the work of Geocoder.us that provides free address look-up information based on the U.S. Census, so that users can enter any address or intersection and learn the longitude and latitude coordinates for that location, or the work of Knowledge As Power which will develop a legislator email management and constituent relations communications system to increase transparency between legislators and their constituents. Speechology.org will host a Web site that will archive video of key political speeches-including debates, State of the Union addresses, convention speeches congressional testimony and campaign advertisements-and facilitate online public critical analysis. And three additional grants — Pacific Northwest Topic Hotlist, Richmond Sunlight and the Utah News Aggregator — have developed innovative ways to create more transparency for their legislators closer to home.

We are very excited to be supporting all of these groups.

Sunlight accepts applications for its Mini-Grants on an ongoing basis.

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We’re announcing the availability of “mini-grants” of $1,000 to $5,000 to fund original ideas, tools, Web sites, and blogs that create a better, more dynamic relationship between members of Congress and the citizens they represent. See here for the full press release.

We encourage grant applications from local or regional nonprofit organizations and Web sites, from offshoots of national groups, from individuals and from informal groups of citizens.

Maybe you have a project or blog that can’t reach its maximum audience because you need a server upgrade, or you’re a political blogger who needs expensive polling data. Perhaps you’re creating a wiki to get the public involved in designing idea policy. If so, and your project’s goal is to help make Congress more open and transparent, then don’t delay and submit your proposal on our site.

We’ll be looking for creative projects that fit our mission and have a likelihood of success and replication by others. As a rule, Sunlight does not award grants for salaries or general overhead expenses, but does for technology upgrades. Grants are available to augment existing projects or to jumpstart new ones.

Applications are due January 1, 2008. We’re always impressed by the practical innovations proposed by our grant seekers, and can’t wait to see your new ideas to make a more open and transparent Congress.

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We’re announcing today a combination of large and mini-grants to promote openness and citizen involvement in the work of Congress. See here for the full press release.

Each of these grants is exciting in its own way: two of the larger grants are cutting edge projects in the world of citizen journalism - one to Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.Net and the other to Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media.

I feel like Jay’s project is on the cusp of making some very big waves. As I said to him, if this works (and I think it will), the Washington game will never be the same again. The oh-so-cozy relationship between lawmakers and the old media will be replaced by something that is much more powerful - fearless citizens. I am certain that the establishment media will be challenged - and that’s a very good thing - by this experiment’s anticipated successes and perhaps they will recall that their mission to "afflict the comfortable." And one further thought: what Rosen is trying to do with NewAssignment.Net is something that media reform activists should start paying attention to since it can offer a way around the mainstream media’s failure.

Dan Gillmor’s work that we are supporting is a beta test of how future congressional elections might be covered by a combination of citizen and professional journalists. His Center for Citizen Media will oversee the creation of a website that hopes to glean everything that can possibly be reported on a Congressional election, with an emphasis on drawing on the talents and ideas of local citizen reporters. Imagine citizens taking video cameras to fundraising events, or house meetings, or conversations with senior citizens and then posting them all on a single website. Imagine combining that with first-person reports, links to articles, data bases on campaign financing, video archives of past statements, etc. etc. It’s going to be a rush to get this going in one district this fall (it will happen in CA-11) but Dan has marshaled students in a class he’s teaching and some other terrific talent too that will pump it up fast.

Equally exciting - though in a different arena — is the work of the Institute on Money in State Politics. We gave them a small grant a few months ago to begin the development and implementation of their initial Web Service Application Program Interfaces (APIs) and we are so impressed with their initial work that this grant is being made to allow them to continue apace. This grant will also allow them to conduct extensive outreach to be able to test their APIs in the real world this year, and it will mean that they are able to develop several custom APIs for journalists and/or academics. IMSP is really leading the way for all the data crunching groups in enthusiastically endorsing this Web 2.0 way of distributing information.

And finally, we are announcing our final three grants under our mini-grant program. Zephyr came up with the notion of creating a pool of $20,000 and offering grants, not to exceed $5,000, to innovative programs that are focused on transparency for members of Congress. And it was a terrific idea because it surfaced people and projects well beyond what we knew was happening out there. We couldn’t be happier with the results of our request for proposals. All of submissions we received were certainly worthy projects and the total of six that were selected for funding show the power and creativity of what people are doing to inform citizens about Congress using technology and the Internet. I suspect we will decide to do more of these mini-grant programs in the future.

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later

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Not much attention was paid to a new report issued by Rep. Henry Waxman on government contracting. 

Bottom line? The value of federal contracts has grown 86 percent between 2000 and 2005, going from $203 billion in 2000 to $377.5 billion. Waxman’s team studied more than 500 sources, including government and independent agency reports, audits, and investigations to prepare the report. Waxman’s staff also interviewed government procurement experts and relied on data from the Federal Procurement Data System to reach its conclusions, the report said. Sounds like pretty thorough research to me.

I can’t find the answer to how long it took Waxman’s team to do this study. But whatever it took, imagine how much faster it would have been  if all government contracts and grants were reported on line in a searchable format on a regular basis. As important, it would mean that anyone could monitor how much is being spent and who’s getting the lion’s share of the money on a regular, ongoing basis. And that would mean watchdogging government on an ongoing basis.

Congress has turned aside several opportunities in the last couple of weeks to require just this kind of disclosure. So, Sunight’s early hunch to fund such a database was right one. We stepped up early and made a grant to OMB Watch for that purpose. Watch for it early in October. And here’s an opportunity. OMB Watch is looking for a few beta testers in August  – so if you’re interested let them or us, know.

Meanwhile here are some of the key findings from the Waxman report:

"Procurement spending is highly concentrated on a few large contractors, with the five largest federal contractors–all defense contractors–receiving over 20 percent of the contract dollars awarded in 2005. Halliburton, the largest federal contractor in Iraq, is the fastest growing contractor under the Bush administration, with its government contract dollars increasing by 600 percent between 2000 and 2005."

No further comment. 

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We’ve had numerous requests — both by phone and online — over the past several days about how to apply for grants from the Sunlight Foundation so I wanted to take a couple of minutes today to talk about that.

First you should know that we know that there is a large community of people and organizations who are already doing amazing things when it comes to making information about Congress available and accessible. We want to encourage them to go further by digitizing more information to make it searchable more easily and to present it in a truly public-friendly fashion. Our primary example of this is a grant we have already made (to the Center for Responsive Politics) to take the Personal Financial Disclosure Forms now filed on paper (!) by elected officials and make a searchable database out of them. Another example is a grant to OMB Watch to create a searchable database out of government grants and contracts.

Everyday we hear from someone who has a website that contains information about Congress that has important information. It’s really amazing how many people have taken on the tough job of creating information resources about what Congress is doing with little or no financial support. Kudos to these extraordinary citizens. 

But we want to go further than supporting just the traditional subject public disclosure databases. We are mostly interested in supporting those who are interested in using a Web 2.0 model that enables the media, bloggers, and citizens to sift, share and combine this information in ways that are useful for them. The more creative, and user-friendly, the better. Remember that "transparency" for members of Congress is the focus of our work.

The process is simple: Send me a 2-3 page outline of what you have in mind with a budget. If it fits the criteria above, we’ll let you know and then we’ll request more detail. We’ll be making decisions on a rolling basis so there is no specific deadline.

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