About Sunlight Labs
Sunlight Labs is a Sunlight Foundation pilot project to prototype tech ideas to improve government transparency and political influence disclosure. We also provide technical support to Sunlight Foundation sponsored projects.
We like to collaborate with others to pool resources and facilitate sharing of data and technologies. A current major focus is working with the such partners developing APIs — Application Program Interfaces — which allows one program to talk to another and share data. Find out more on our resources page. Sometimes we just like to have fun. Oh, and of course we also have a blog.
We're Hiring
- Production Assistant
The Sunlight Foundation is looking for an aspiring individual to assist the Creative Director and work closely with the Sunlight Labs team in the creation of user-friendly interactive prototypes, mashups, widgets, and web sites.
Labs API
The official name of the SunlightLabs is actually The Sunlight Mashup Labs so you would expect us to into APIs, the driving force behind modern mashups. However, after poking around the web to see what data were available we were very surprised how difficult it was to get current, basic information about members of congress. Further, while different organizations - both non-profit and government agencies - were tracking the same 535 members of congress, they were all using different IDs. This, we thought, was ridiculous.
Thus, we set out to create an up-to-date database for the 110th Congress that provides basic clerical information about members of congress (phone, email, district etc.) via API.
Moreover, we provide converter methods to convert between the different IDs, thereby facilitating bringing together data about the same person from different sources. To complete the package, we have provided basic API methods that tie cities to zipcodes to districts to latitude/longitude, perfect for those web-based mashups.
Check out the Sunlight Labs API
Lab Projects
| Project |
Description |
Status |
|
Popup Politicians |
Mouseover bubbles
with mini-profiles of Members of Congress |
Released; version 1.0 |
|
Earmark Map |
A Google Maps mash up of earmarks from the Labor HHS Appropriations Bill | Released; version 1.0 |
|
Is Congress a Family Business? |
A distribute research guide for determining which House of Representatives members have spouses who are paid to work on their campaigns | Released; version 1.0 (demo available) |
|
Punchclock Campaign: interactive results map |
An interactive map showing the results of Sunlight Network's punchclock campaign
|
Released; version 1.0 |
|
Sunlight Seekr |
An AJAX widget that does a text search on several sites: The Sunlight Foundation, Congresspedia, Center for Responsive Politics, GovTrack.us, and Insitute on Money in State Politics.
|
Released; version 1.0 |
|
Congressional Web Site Investigation |
Citizen journalists evaluated congressional Web sites to determine whether they provided transparency information.
|
Released; version 1.0 (demo) |
|
Sunlight Labs API |
An up-to-date database for the 110th Congress that provides basic clerical information about members of congress (phone, email, district etc.) via API. (More Information)
|
Released; |
| Google Gadget: Foundation Blog RSS Reader |
A google gadget that displays the latest blog entries from the Sunlight Foundation Staff
|
Released |
|
LOUIS |
Large indexed and cross-referenced depository of federal documents from the executive and legislative branches of government, and API access. |
Released; beta version (screencast) |