The Sunlight Foundation is offering grants of $1,000 to $5,000 for local groups that have creative ideas for changing the relationship between elected Federal representatives and the people they represent. This is the second year of our mini-grant program. Last year we funded five extraordinary programs (see below) selected from nearly one hundred applicants.

Successful applicants will receive the grant, consulting and strategic support, and networking opportunities. Our goal is to provide that extra element that takes a project from good to great — server space, a video camera, or access to polling data — or provide the seed that makes a new project viable. Projects could range from citizen media, to creative use of the internet to engage citizens in watchdogging, to opening up new ways of communicating with federal lawmakers to creative mapping of lawmakers’ activities.

We encourage applications from existing small local nonprofits and websites, from offshoots of national groups, from individuals, and from informal groups of citizens.

We plan to give a total of 8-10 grants over the year, and 3-5 grants in the first cycle, which begins today. The first set of mini-grant applications will be considered on a rolling basis between now and June 1.

Projects will be judged on how closely they fit with Sunlight’s purposes of using technology to enable citizens to learn more about what their elected representatives are doing, reducing corruption, and ensuring greater transparency. They will also be judged on their creativity, and their ability to grow or be replicated. As a general rule, we will not fund salaries or general overhead expenses, but will fund technological upgrades.

To apply, please send a one page summary of your project, a budget (including the amount requested from Sunlight) and contact information to our organizing and outreach director Nisha Thompson (nthompson@sunlightfoundation.com). Feel free to call her at 1-202-742-1520 if you have questions before applying.

Previous grantees are not eligible.

Below is a list of Mini-grantees 2006

Arizona Congresswatch. We made a grant of $1,650 for access to poll data to this organization that is a one-stop shop for all information on Arizona members of Congress. Arizona Congresswatch, is constantly
updated with every action a member of the congressional delegation takes, or statement he or she makes. The rate of updates and breadth of sources monitored make the Web site a reliable and trusted resource for anyone in Arizona to find out what their member of Congress is up to.

Connecticut Local Politics Blogspot. We made a $1,600 grant for an upgrade to this nonpartisan, nonprofit blog that covers Connecticut politics from town halls to its congressional delegation. The site, which began in January of 2005, welcomes all points of view, and includes opinion pieces on the news of the day from many viewpoints, interviews, live online question-and-answer sessions with candidates, an informational wiki about the 2006 election and coverage of major events.

Bluegrass Report. This blog won a Koufax award for its political reporting last year, and has become of hub of political life in Kentucky. Since then, BluegrassReport.org reached a technological limit with its very basic Web site as it tried to communicate with its 25,000 readers a week. We made a $2,500 grant that allowed Bluegrass Report to upgrade its Web site and add software to better educate the voters.

Metavid. We made a grant of $5,000 to this project which seeks to capture, stream, archive and facilitate real-time collective
[re]mediation of Federal legislative proceedings. Metavid uses the Internet as a platform for the democratization of citizens’ relationships to their representatives. It opens up video source footage of House and Senate proceedings for permanent reusable online access, allowing citizens to remix, investigate, and track their representatives in a participant-driven open source archive.

More Perfect. We made a grant of $5,000 to this innovative new Web site that enables citizens to participate more directly in the creation of public policy and laws. More Perfect allows individuals, public
interest groups, local governments and elected officials to present their issues, policy proposals and positions to a diverse and engaged audience, gathering real-time feedback while potentially avoiding a time consuming, costly and often uncertain public outreach process. More Perfect utilizes wiki-technology, made popular by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to allow visitors to the site the ability to directly edit Web pages on the site.

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The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran an Op-Ed this weekend about the prospects of using the Internet for more deliberative public reasoning, discussing one of the projects we are considering for a minigrant — MorePerfect.org. More Perfect is a new wiki-forum for collaborative law and policy development:

Will a Web-based, wiki-democracy work? I don’t know. I’m skeptical of the open platform because it can be manipulated by a special interest. On the other hand, the More Perfect group requires registration and that at least limits temptation. I also think we need a wider range of public policy options. Too many of our political discussions are locked into an "either, or" framework. We build a new viaduct or a tunnel. I’d rather see a variety of ideas — and then debate the logic. There is the potential for a richer discussion, say, about reforming a bus or ferry system, when the people who use that system add their everyday perspectives. Users could give quick feedback about what works in a system — and what’s a waste of time. More Perfect — or any wiki-democratic venture — might not change the way we govern ourselves. But it’s worth experimenting to see if we get any new ideas.

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I’ve just started this job with Sunlight a little over a month now, and one of our first projects, providing mini-grants of $1000 to $5000 to innovative people with risky or brilliant ideas about opening up government is already making me a little less morbid than I was about a year ago. Its nice to be reminded we’re a country teeming these persistent citizens, daydreaming at midnight, and over 20 different ideas have come in the door so far from Arkansas to Hawaii. If we can’t fund all of them, which we can’t even begin to, hopefully we can at least provide some boost, some direction, some connections to make something possible.

The basic information about the grants is here, and we’re still taking applications for the next month, so if you have an idea getting restless in your drawer, pull it out and send it to us. Ellen Rice is very helpful if you’ve never applied for a grant before, she’s happy to talk to you. 202-742-1520 ext. 226.

Perhaps the funniest feedback we got was the request to hyphenate mini-grants whenever we wrote it, lest it look too much like “immigrants.” (I suppose the other way to avoid confusion is start writing immi-grants with a hyphen.) But we complied, and are completely hyphenated now.

I telecommute I guess, though it feels less tele- than neta- (what is skype plus aim office work? skaiming?) and it’s the midriff of summer here in Vermont, hot, 94, 95 on the bank clock, even by 10 AM. The politicians are almost the only men not wearing shorts but staying outside — on the street corner yesterday a young aspiring auditor was sweating out the muggy, buggy, mid-afternoon with a handmade sign covered in cellophane, to keep out the sweat and occasional rain.

I walked down the Winooski yesterday and found about 8 teenagers wet with recent water, standing over a small cliff. “Ma’am, ma’am, I’ll jump in if you jump with me,” one of them said. A couple of girls were near them, said it was safe to swim, and then one of them started crying, inexplicably, about her finger. I couldn’t’ see anything wrong with her finger, and I couldn’t tell if she was on drugs or actually hurt, but it sounded like more of an existential wail than how you feel when you brush up against some nettles. Her friend didn’t want my help, they both kept saying everything was okay. After they left I swam alone.

What does this have to do with corruption? What does it have to do with open government? I can tie the knot, if you want, but most of the time that’s just a question I ask myself, too, not trying to tie it too neatly – its not just about the water perhaps being too dirty to swim in, which it is.

I met William Greider about a month ago, alone in his office in the middle of a conference he wasn’t attending, and he asked me, “what if a political party actually set out to do what people asked it to do?” and talked about how maybe what we most need is Parliament of Sorrows and a Parliament of Dreams. I don’t know, perhaps, but the phrases have stuck in my head and I see it now, sitting on the park bench as a man, not mad, just proximate eating lunch, is so eager to tell me what he thinks about the Hawaiin secession movement, having no one else to tell it to.

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later

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