Sunlight Foundation

Making Government Transparent and Accountable

The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Underlying all of our efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the public's confidence in government

• New “RaceTracker” to Track Every Congressional Race Nationwide

  By Jake Brewer on 06/11/09 @ 2:41 pm | 0 Comments

  This is pretty awesome: a non-partisan, fully-referenced, open-source and crowd-sourced wiki project that lists every candidate running in every U.S. Senate, House and governor’s race.

  The project, dubbed RaceTracker, was coordinated by the folks at the  Swing State Project as they completed a nationwide survey of the candidates in each race.  As we move into the 2010 congressional races, the site will use crowd-sourced participation to keep it current.

  http://www.opencongress.org/wiki/RaceTracker

  Project lead Conor Kenny of the Sunlight Foundation writes

  You can now check on the status of each of the seven candidates considering a run for the seat of Illinois’ Sen. Roland Burris (D) or the eight who are eyeing Rep. Betsy Markey (D-Colo.). We’ll even tell you who’s a confirmed as a candidate versus who’s merely considering or rumored to be a candidate, how much money they’ve raised, the district boundaries and the district-specific electoral trends in the last three presidential elections.

  In true wikified fashion, one of the most important aspects of RaceTracker is that all the data is freely available via an open API for use in other web apps or visualizations.  I’m looking forward to seeing what others will come up with as the possibilities abound. (Continue reading…)