SUNLIGHT FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES NEW GRANTS

Craigslist Founder Also Joins Board of Directors

April 12, 2007

Contact: Gabriela Schneider 202-742-1520 ext 236

WASHINGTON, D C – The Sunlight Foundation is announcing its second round of grants for 2007, totaling $267,000, including two grants from its Mini-grant program. All the grants are being awarded to organizations that are using new “Web 2.0” technology to increase transparency for the work of Congress by using new technology to put information into citizens’ hands via the Internet. The group also announced that Craig Newmark, founder of and customer service representative for Craigslist, will be joining the Board of Directors. Newmark had previously served on the Sunlight Foundation’s Advisory Board. “Craig Newmark is a visionary, and he has an understanding of power of the Internet technology that is unrivaled. He’s been a trusted advisor to us, and we’re pleased he will assume a more formal role in guiding the Sunlight Foundation”, said Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s co-founder and executive director. “We are all very excited about the opportunities that the Sunlight Foundation has to advance the goal of transparency and openness in Congress,” she continued. “The groups we are helping to fund are on the cutting edge of Web 2.0 technology, and are among the best at using the Internet to strengthen democracy. The Sunlight Foundation will continue to award more grants throughout the year. The grants being announced today are: Capitol News Connection: “Ask Your Lawmaker Widget.” $100,000 for one year. CNC will create, market and implement a “widget” (to be displayed on several hundred public radio sites) that would allow citizens to ask questions of any Senator or Representative by uploading text, audio or video, and then collectively rank the most important questions. CNC journalists will ask lawmakers the top questions each day, and the audio responses will be uploaded to the widget, accessible for downloading and available to radio stations for broadcast. The goal of this mix of citizen journalism and traditional journalism focuses on enabling and improving the dialogue between members of Congress and citizens. Capitol News Connection is an independent news service that brings politics ‘home’ to 1.87 million public radio listeners on 200+ stations with localized and interactive coverage of Congress. Metavid. $157,000 for one year. Metavid is an open, online platform that contains a video archive of public domain, U.S. House and Senate proceedings built completely on open source tools. Hosted by the University of California at Santa Cruz, Metavid is a community archival platform which opens up the archive at every level allowing for easy reusable access to government audio video records and a means for others to create new interfaces to the archive. This grant will cover Metavid's full-time development costs to improve and expand the accessibility and usability of the video record of Congressional activity, improve and expand the Metavid hardware infrastructure, develop new tools for indexing, selection and annotation, and create a programming interface that allows third-party developers to create new interfaces and mashups of the materials in the archive. OpEdNews. $5,000. www.opednews.com This site will create a volunteer moderated website system, with mini-sites centered on Members of Congress. Each page will collect articles, blogs and provide outside links for each member of Congress. Information from Congresspedia and links to more in-depth articles will enrich the OpEdNews. The site will be integrated into the OpEdNews.com site, so the articles will be spidered by Google news and other news aggregation sites, maximizing the reach of the articles. Each registered user of the site will have a member page that automatically lists his or her Congressperson, Senators and selected information about them, provided by Congresspedia. WashingtonWatch.com. $5,000. www.washingtonwatch.com This site provides information about legislation pending in Congress along with government estimates of the costs or savings of pending bills, expressed in terms of families and individuals. It contains several ranking features, provides opportunities for citizen input and is initiating a policy wiki. The grant money will be used for further marketing efforts, primarily geared toward developing policy experts as participants. Founded in January, 2006, the mission of the Sunlight Foundation is to strengthen the relationship between lawmakers and their constituents. Sunlight puts information and tools in citizens' hands so they can learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing. Its ultimate goal is full transparency by Congress, its Members and staff will help reduce corruption, ensure greater accountability, and foster public trust in this vital institution of democracy. Since its founding, the Sunlight Foundation has issued nearly $2 million to groups to digitize existing information about Congress and those that use Internet technology to further Sunlight's goals. Additionally, the Sunlight Foundation has fostered its own projects such as Congresspedia, OpenCongress.org and Congress’ Family Business. ###