We’re continuing the Sunshine Week festivities with two events dedicated to promoting a more open government. We invite you to join us, and for those of you who can’t make it to Washington, DC, we encourage you to watch the webcasts of the events.

Today at 1pm EDT, in conjunction with Open the Government, Greg Elin of Sunlight Labs will moderate a panel to demonstrate new ways nonprofits have made government data open and useful to the public. Panelists include:

• Sheila Krumholz of Center for Responsive Politics
• David Moore of OpenCongress.org
• Sean Moulton of FedSpending.org
• Daniel X. O’Neil of EveryBlock

The event will be held in the Holeman Lounge of the National Press Club in DC, but you can watch it live online. (You’ll need to register first. The registration page is the same page you’ll visit to view the webcast.)

Then tomorrow at 1:30 EDT, Sunlight and Omidyar Network will host a press briefing featuring Lawrence Lessig, who will announce the launch of his new Change Congress project. Lessig, renowned expert in intellectual property, founder of Creative Commons and Sunlight Advisory Board member, recently changed his mission to combat the influence of money in American democracy. The event will be held in the Murrow, White and Lisagor rooms of the National Press Club in Washington, and will be webcast here.

Hope you can join us!

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ProgrammableWeb recently launched a new central resource of over a dozen government-related mashups and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to improve access to legislative, civic and political information.

ProgrammableWeb is already a major hub for the Web 2.0 technology community around its directories of mashups and Web service APIs. The new site is now listing Web applications that help citizens examine and remix government data to shed more light on the work of the federal government.

ProgrammableGov’s APIs and Mashup Dashboard currently offers government information APIs and mashups developed by government agencies and those developed independently by citizens and transparency advocate organizations, including several created or supported by the Sunlight Foundation.

These include:

* The SunlightLabs API, which enables users to retrieve contact information for members of the United States Congress

* The LOUIS API, which provides searchable access to congressional, presidential, and GAO documents

* The FedSpending.org API created by OMB Watch, which includes methods for finding information about awarded contracts and information that assists businesses with applying for government contracts

* The Follow the Money API, created by the National Institute on Money in State Politics, which enables querying for information about individual candidates, political action committees (PACs), ballot measures, and campaign contributors, with options for filtering and sorting the results

* The MAPLight.org API, created by MAPLight.org, which enables querying for information about legislative votes in Congress and how they are connected to campaign donations.

ProgrammableWeb, also links to resources to help US citizens find contact information for members of Congress and congressional districts for any US address. Likewise, on the site, residents of the United Kingdom can access the TheyWorkForYou API, created by MySociety.org, to learn information about their representatives in Parliament and the House of Lords.

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When one of our tools is used by liberals and conservatives, we are happy.

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It would have been a great one year anniversary present to have had the Senate's electronic filing bill pass today, but we're not going to let that rain on our parade as we pause, briefly, to celebrate the one year anniversary of Sunlight's public launch. Just 12 months ago, we announced the start up of Congresspedia and the results of national polling that demonstrated — overwhelmingly — the public's support for greater transparency in Congress. We feel like the efforts of our first year have lifted the lid off of what is really possible. Today we marveled at the good luck of the timing of our effort because it seems like our very presence at this time has galvanized more than we ever would have dreamed possible in our first year.

A terrific Wired Magazine piece that appeared today touts three of our grantees — MAPLight.org, Center for Responsive Politics and Congresspedia. It begins: "Tread carefully, politicians — concerned citizens are watching your every move on the web. Their tools? Custom data mashups that use public databases to draw correlations between every vote cast and every dollar spent in Washington." How good do we feel that Sunlight has helped make this — and more – possible?

Then there are other projects we've launched — OpenCongress.org that is putting out information in more user friendly ways for citizens to learn about Congress' work and the Open House Project — an online collaborative effort — that is examining how to make modest technological improvements in how the House operates. We've funded databases that make information about Congress more accessible — FedSpending.org, Revolving Door, Lobbying, Travel, and Personal Financial Disclosure. We've launched numerous efforts to engage citizens in doing research - Is Congress a Family Business? and the Congressional Website Investigation, and we recently launched a Real Time Investigations site. We've nurtured citizen journalism efforts with some of the best in the business — Jay Rosen and Dan Gilmor. We've produced new tools like Popup Politicians and the Labs API and given hundred of hours of consultative work to many organizations in helping them understand and participate in the world of Web 2.0. We've created new educational tools - like Watchdogging 101 and convened meetings between technologists and data gurus that have produced long-lasting collaborative relationships. Because of Sunlight's efforts through our Punch Clock Campaign, five members of Congress now are publishing their calendars openly online - a hopeful new trend. We've worked in coalition with the blogosphere and the mainstream media - right, left and center — to end secrets holds on legislation and advance more transparency for earmarks.

But as importantly, we are changing the way Washington looks at the power of the Internet and how technologists look at Washington. And we've only just begun.

Speaking of which, it's time to get back to the fight.

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If last year — Sunlight's first year of operation — was a little like being shot out of a cannon, it's hard to describe what the first quarter of this year has been like. Suffice it to say, we are moving at something beyond warp speed.

As a result we have some dramatic growth underway. Here's what's happening.

Our Sunlight Labs has become a core element of our work and we will dramatically expand its capacity this year. It started as an experiment in mid-2006 as a way to both support our grantees and experiment with technology ourselves. After an amazingly successful first year under the co-directorship of consultants Greg Elin and Micah Sifry, the Labs has become part of our cutting edge as our technology and software development arm, well beyond its original mandate. It's now evolving further to better support its expanded internal and external activities.

Greg Elin is becoming our consulting Chief Data Architect with responsibilities that include managing all API development with our partner organizations (a very high priority for us this year) and our own internal data products. He'll also be tackling the "names standardization" problem with other Labs staff. Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej of Personal Democracy Forum will continue in their valued role as strategic consultants to the Foundation and to the Labs.

At the same we will be hiring a Chief Technology Officer for the Foundation overall, a position we purposely did not have during our first year while we were exploring the role technology would play internally. We have a better sense now and we're looking for a very special person to lead the development of technology strategy, implementation and operations for the Foundation and the Labs. He or she will be overseeing a growing group of staff and consultants tackling a wide range of projects and problems. here's the job description. Send candidates our way.

We will also be hiring additional Labs staff and consultants, to assist on our various projects. Our Communications shop is also expanding as is our own real time investigative work. We've hired a terrific full-time Communications Director who will begin work on April 2nd — Gabriela Schneider — who's most recently been at the Council of Foundations. Also newly on board is Anu Narayanswamy who comes to us from the Center for Public Integrity to work on real time investigative projects that she and Bill Allison will be launching — including a daily blog that will chronicle their investigations.

And one final note. Zephyr Teachout, who worked as our National Director for the past nine months, is leaving us this week. The combination of working long-distance from Vermont and her desire to spend more time in the academic world — writing and teaching– led to her to a decision to leave us. We'll miss her unfailing energy, creativity, and exuberance. We plan to stay in close touch.

Note: job descriptions mentioned above will be posted later today.

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If you're a regular visitor to our site you noticed sometime last week, on the left side of our home page, our latest widget - we've dubbed it Sunlight Seekr. It's the first step to a one click search engine that culls through multiple databases. We put it up last week to play around with it and it appears to be working just fine so today we are going public with it. At the moment it does a simple search of five data sets: our own Sunlight Foundation and Congresspedia sites, The Institute on State Money and Politics and Center for Responsive Politics sites for state and federal campaign contributions, and GovTrack.org. Type in the name of an individual, corporation, and zip code and see what pops up. (To do really in-depth searches of all these sites APIs are inevitable, but not all the sites we wanted to include have APIs yet.)

We'll be adding more databases to the search function soon. Probably the next one to be added in will be FedSpending.org. We're hoping to eventually build this out into a true Accountability Matrix - a set of databases linked together that can help the user examine the full depth of money, power and influence in Washington. We're a long way from that right now, but that is our goal.

This is another amazing product of our Sunlight Labs team who mission is to prototype tech ideas to improve government transparency and political influence disclosure.

Remember that our Lab projects are experiments. So play with this one, even add it to your website if you feel brave. Here are all the details and documentation for this widget.

And do note: we are asking nicely that you register with us if you want to use this tool. We are doing this only so that we can keep track of just how many different sites are using it. The registration is very simple and will just take not more than 30 seconds of your time. And we promise not to pester you with emails.

Seek and you shall find.

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We’re delighted that so many sites have been picking up the news of our Popup Politicians’ widget. You can find it on Boing Boing and TechCrunch, Open Source News, The Left Coaster and a host of others. A number of excellent suggestions have already been made. Some folks want us to expand us to include state and local politicians, some want to see other information in the profile such as positions on environmental issues, or links to criminal records. Keep your ideas coming on how to improve on it.

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We’ve been promising to introduce our Sunlight Labs more formally and today we’re doing that, along with the announcement of a really neat widget that we’re calling "Popup Politicians." Before you imagine the worst, like, Representative J. Dennis Hastert or Sen. John McCain or Representative John Boehner popping out of cake, take a look at what Greg Elin and Duncan Werner have developed — a web page plug-in that links the reader to information about who’s financing the lawmaker’s campaign, the lawmaker’s voting record, and their profile on Congresspedia. The widget appears as a small popup window when you mouse-over the little sun icon that appears at the end of the name.

We’re experimenting with the Popup on our site today. Check out all the technical information on the Sunlight Labs page.

What is it? Popup Politicians is an AJAX-powered widget which contacts a remote database here at Sunlight to retrieve links we’ve selected for a politician. The single Javascript that powers the mouse-over "bubbles" is served from Sunlight Labs server along with the data. When you load the page, the Javascript looks for Technorati-styled link tags for Members of Congress on the web page and then dynamically modifies found links to add the rollover action and a mouse-over bubble.

Sunlight Labs is readying various flavors of the widget for increased scalability. The basic widget can be added to a web site or blog by simply adding the Javascript and style sheet to the page’s headers and then manually adding a properly formed linked to each members of congress name where a popup is desired. Micah Sifry tried it last night on his personal blog and it worked. Other flavors include local server-side PHP code to automatically search and replace members of congress’s names with the necessary links. Sunlight has built a Drupal plugin that does this for our own site, www. sunlightfoundation.com, and also built a WordPress 2.0 plugin as well. Plugins for the major blogging and CMS platforms are planned and SunlightLabs is eager to find open source developers to help accomplish this and extend the the plugin. 

That’s beyond the extent of my knowledge. Check it out here. And email Greg Elin at gelin@sunlightfoundation.com for more information, particularly if I have left you thoroughly confused. And remember, we’re still experimenting with this, so all is not perfect yet.

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How lucky can we get? We’ve had another amazing person join the Sunlight team, specifically working on the Sunlight Labs effort and I want to introduce him to you.

Carl Anderson has been involved in things I can barely grasp — agent-based modeling and complex systems. (This, of course, means he has the qualifications to understand Congress.)  He’s the author of more than 35 scientific journal papers and an interdisciplinary scientist. He has worked in biology (Duke; Regensburg, Germany; Aarhus, Denmark), mathematics (Sheffield, UK), and industrial and system engineering (Georgia Tech) university departments.

More recently, he has admitted to being a geek and has become more heavily involved in software development, especially dynamic web applications using new approaches such as AJAX. That’s when we snagged him. Already he’s been doing some work that has knocked our socks off — finding very simple ways to present very complex information that actually makes digesting information easy, and well, just plain fun.

Hold onto your hats! And keep an eye on Sunlight Labs.

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Already the Sunlight Mash-Up Labs announced in May is striding toward my fantasy of one-click political influence disclosure. Last week, Lab Co-director, Greg Elin, guided me through the results of a week of "hacking" with Mike Krejci, lead programmer for The Institute of Money in State Politics. Supported by a small grant from the Sunlight Foundation, Greg went to Portland, Oregon and helped Mike begin work on The Institute’s "web services API".

The Institute tracks campaign finance data on some 18,000 state-office candidates each election cycle and now manages a database of some 14 million records spanning many years. Even though The Institute makes this data available via its respected FollowTheMoney.org web site — which is pretty amazing when you think about it — the fact is getting at that data can be cumbersome, especially when you are on a different web site. As it is now, looking up information on your state candidate means leaving whatever website you are on and going to FollowTheMoney.org and searching through various pages to look up the data you want. 

Web services API changes this picture dramatically. According to Greg, a web services API (short for Application Programmer’s Interface), "is a machine-friendly interface to a web site’s underlying complex database and application."  By adding a web services API to their web site, The Institute is making it significantly easier for programmers at other web sites to dynamically incorporate The Institute’s data into their own web-based applications. And that means in the future you and I won’t have to change web sites to see the data that matters. It will already be there.

To give us non-ubergeeks a sense of this future, Mike and Greg mashed-up a few web page "widgets" which remotely search The Institute’s data. You can try one here. You can search by state, year, office, won/lost, party and even candidate without ever leaving the web page or even reloading the web page. Your search is automatically sent to The Institute’s API in the background which delivers the results dynamically into the page at which you are currently looking.

The ability to easily integrate data from one web site into another really changes the big picture. There’s simply too much data for a single entity to manage. It simply takes too long to bounce from site to site to research subtle patterns of influence buying. But allowing summary data, or detailed data, to more easily move between data silos creates the means to browse — and compare — hundreds of million data points simultaneously. Pretty neat.

Greg tells me Mike still has work to do before the APIs are ready for public release, but that Mike made enough progress they are ready for limited trials with The Institute’s partners. I can’t wait to make further announcements.

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