Sunlight Foundation Totally Explained

Everything about The Sunlight Foundation totally explained

The Sunlight Foundation is a 501(c)(3) educational organization founded in January 2006 with the goal of increasing transparency in the United States Congress. The foundation encourages citizen and blogger participation by aggregating existing information and digitizing new information. It is best known for its reporting on Dennis Hastert's Fraudulent Real estate investments.

Founding

The Sunlight Foundation was founded due to recent concerns about the influence of money and relationships, as well as a fear of corruption in the Congress. In a poll conducted in 2005, 75% of the participants said it affected how they voted in the in the 2006 general election.
The Foundation was launched in April 2006 with a $3.5 million contribution from co-founder Michael Klein.

Projects

The Open House Project facilitates study of how the House of Representatives uses the Internet in its daily operations, and lobbies to promote public access to works of the house.

Under the Influence evaluates Congressional Websites to determine whether they've provided legally-required disclosures such as members' daily schedule and earmark lists.

Popup Politicians is a widget that provides mouseover hyperlinks for selected politicians made for use in external websites.

Public Markup is a proposed Transparency in Government Act 2008 and a web site PublicMARKUP.org

to allow this proposed legislation to be marked up by the public.

Grants

For more details on this topic, see the full list on the Sunlight Foundation's website.

$277,000 to MAPLight.org

for the development of a tool that tracks the impact of political contributions at the federal level, based on databases from OpenSecrets.org and the Library of Congress.

$50,000 to FollowTheMoney.org

to provide a publically accessible API for tracking the source of political contributions to executive and legislative officials in the 50 states of the union.

$157,000 to Metavid

to capture, stream and archive federal legislative proceedings for permanent reusable online access.

$384,714 to OMB Watch

to create a database tracking recipients of all federal grants and contracts. It was used for the creation of USASpending.gov

$927,928 to the Center For Responsive Politics

for the expansion of its contributions to OpenSecrets.org. The data includes

Federal campaign contributions
PACs
527 groups
Lobbyist expenditures and activities
Annual congressional financial disclosures
Revolving door cases

Sunlight Network

The Sunlight Network is the advocacy branch of the Sunlight Foundation. It uses its funds for grants to local or regional nonprofit organizations and non-affiliated groups that “have innovative approaches to strengthening the relationship between Members of Congress and the citizens they represent.”

Further Information

Get more info on 'Sunlight Foundation'.

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