The Sunlight Foundation offers “transparency grants” for organizations that are using new “Web 2.0” technology to further the organization’s mission of making information about Congress and the federal government more accessible to the American people. Our goal is to support groups and individuals who are going beyond the traditional, single subject public disclosure database, and who are interested in creating cutting-edge tools to enable the media, bloggers and citizens to sift, share and combine government information in ways that are useful for them.

Through its projects and grant-making, Sunlight serves as a catalyst to create greater political transparency and to foster more openness and accountability in government. To apply for a transparency grant from the Sunlight Foundation, contact us for guidelines. To apply for a mini-grant ($1,000-$5,000), click here.
To date, Sunlight’s major transparency grants have included:

• $100,000 to Capitol News Connection (http://www.cncnews.org/): to fund an interactive widget that will allow citizens, via public radio stations’ Web sites throughout the country, to ask lawmakers specific questions and get responses


• $25,000 to Center for Citizen Media (http://citmedia.org): to develop an Election Year Demonstration Project Web site to cover everything that can be reported on a congressional election, with an emphasis on drawing on the talents and ideas of local citizen journalists


• $55,000 to Center for Democracy and Technology (http://www.cdt.org): to support its OpenCRS project (http://www.opencrs.com) which harnesses the power of the Internet to promote the distribution of Congressional Research Service reports to the public


• $100,000 to Center for Independent Media (http://www.newjournalist.org): to support an effort to establish a national branch of its New Journalist Program in Washington, DC for training of political news bloggers who will cover Congress, federal agencies, the presidency, Supreme Court and the influence of lobbying, the national press corps and campaign finance


• $369,177 to Center for Media and Democracy (http://www.prwatch.org): to continue investment in the joint Sunlight Foundation/Center for Media and Democracy wiki on Congress – Congresspedia


• $117,000 to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (http://www.citizensforethics.org): to fund the launch of its Open Community Open Document Review System, which provides an online review process that enables people across the Internet to review, tag, comment on and rate the importance of government documents received by CREW through Freedom of Information Act requests


• $927,928 to Center for Responsive Politics (http://opensecrets.org): to create databases on lobbyists, 527s, personal financial disclosures and travel, and to expand its campaign finance databases


• $384,714 to The Focus Project’s OMB Watch (http://www.ombwatch.org): Grants to OMB Watch support a project to define a proactive agenda to modernize and increase public disclosure of government information and the organization’s FedSpending.org Web site. This project combines data from the Federal Procurement Data System and the Federal Assistance Award Data System to create a free, searchable database of federal government contracting and spending


• $277,000 to MAPLight.org (http://www.maplight.org) to provide core funding to support the organization’s newly launched Web 2.0 federal search engine that interactively exposes the links between dollars donated by interested parties and congressional votes


• $157,000 to Metavid (http://metavid.ucsc.edu): to create an open, online platform that contains a video archive of public domain U.S. House and Senate proceedings built completely on open source tools


• $50,000 to the National Institute on Money in State Politics (http://www.followthemoney.org): to support the development and implementation of several APIs so programmers can access and display in their own applications the Institute’s data on campaign contributions to political campaigns at the state level


• $10,000 to NewAssignment.Net (http://newassignment.net): to support its launch and work to spur journalistic innovation by grouping veteran journalists and passionate amateurs in online, collaborative reporting efforts


• $10,000 to NewsTrust.net (http://www.newstrust.net): to support its work to harness social wisdom to aggregate and highlight quality online journalism about elected representatives, with a focus on accountability, corruption and transparency in Congress


• $10,000 to The Project on Government Oversight (http://www.pogo.org): a one-time grant supported its investigative reporting and blogging on the “revolving door” between the government and the private sector.


• $25,000 to People for the American Way’s Young Elected Officials Network (http://www.pfaw.org): to support a track on government transparency and accountability at its Young Elected Officials Network annual training and networking conference


• $10,000 to Public Resource, Inc. (http://public.resource.org): in support of the development of a series of conferences on open government


• $200,000 to ReadtheBill.org (http://readthebill.org): to provide initial funding for the public educations efforts of this new organization, the leading advocate for open floor deliberations in the U.S. Congress, to require legislation and conference reports to be posted on the Internet for 72 hours before floor consideration


• $35,000 to Room Eight (http://www.r8ny.com): a grant to this blog, which covers New York politics, supported the expansion of its nonpartisan coverage of the 29 New York congressional members, including their legislative and budgetary activities and earmarks


• $222,000 to Taxpayers for Common Sense (http://www.taxpayer.net): to enable the organization to develop a comprehensive plan to integrate and advance the use of the Internet and related technologies into their overall work.


Mini-grants
Applications are accepted via this form. To date, our mini-grants have supported:


• $1,600 to Arizona Congress Watch (http://azcongresswatch.com): for the acquisition of polling data and a clipping service to support its work to report on the activities of the Arizona congressional delegation


• $2,500 to BluegrassReport.org (http://www.bluegrassreport.org): to fund software upgrades that power its Web site, which educates voters as it highlights the issues of political corruption and transparency in government, particularly in Kentucky


• $1,600 to Connecticut Local Politics (http://www.ctlocalpolitics.net): for the acquisition of polling data, a video camera and the cost of Web hosting for this nonpartisan, not-for profit blog that covers Connecticut politics from town halls to the state’s delegation in the U.S. Congress


• $5,000 to Geocoder.us (http://geocoder.us): This site provides free address look-up information based on the U.S. Census, so that users can enter any address or intersection and learn the longitude and latitude coordinates for that location. The mini-grant supports the creation of an API to show congressional district boundaries for all U.S. addresses and the improvement of the site's open source address recognition system. Ultimately, this funding will support the site's ability to ascertain a congressional district from an address without the need to manually look up a zip+4 code on the U.S. Postal Service Web site.


• 5,000 to Knowledge As Power (http://www.knowledgeaspower.org): to support the creation of a legislator email management and constituent relations communications system to increase transparency between legislators and their constituents by organizing a more effective form of communication between the two groups. This Web mail service pairs with KAP's existing legislation-tracking service, giving legislators and their staff the tools necessary to efficiently manage incoming constituent emails and systematize corresponding responses with personalized or automated letters. Sunlight's mini-grant will support a pilot email management system for one to two congressional offices and the entire Washington State Legislature


• $4,500 to More Perfect (http://www.moreperfect.org): to support its development of a wiki designed to involve the public in creating and collaborating on laws and policy


• $5,000 to OpEdNews (http://www.opednews.com): to create a volunteer moderated Web site system that aggregates news articles, blog coverage and links to Congresspedia articles for every member of Congress


• $5,000 to Pacific Northwest Topic Hotlist (http://www.topichotlist.com): The Pacific Northwest Topic Hotlist aggregates over 100 political news blogs in the Pacific Northwest and organizes several hundred postings by topic, specifically highlighting coverage by local bloggers of legislative issues and their representatives in Congress. This grant provides funding for Web hosting services for this news aggregator site and its accompanying widgets


• $2,500 to Richmond Sunlight (http://www.richmondsunlight.com): The Richmond Sunlight Web site monitors the activity of the Virginia legislature. Sunlight's mini-grant supports the purchase of an entire session of the Virginia Legislature's closed circuit video broadcast. The video will be then converted to QuickTime, posted on YouTube on a daily basis and integrated into the Richmond Sunlight Web site


• $5,000 to Speechology.org (http://speechology.org): to support the creation and maintenance of a Web site that will archive video of key political speeches-including debates, State of the Union addresses, convention speeches congressional testimony and campaign advertisements-and facilitate online public critical analysis. Using Speechology.org, citizens will watch, evaluate and comment on the truthfulness of the speeches


• $2,000 to Utah News Aggregator to support the creation and of a Web news hub service and email newsletter subscription service for bloggers, political activists, legislators, candidates and concerned citizens of Utah. This forthcoming Web site will provide citizens with a full picture of daily politics in Utah, specifically focusing on local blog and mainstream media coverage of political news; congressional news updates, press releases and votes; a calendar of events including legislative meetings and messaging from all viable political parties and candidates


• $5,000 to WashingtonWatch.com (http://www.washingtonwatch.com): to support its outreach and efforts to determine the average cost, or savings, per individual of each bill introduced in Congress by performing calculations on government estimates compared to the US population