Sunlight Labs Announces Debut of "Pop Up Politicians"

July 19, 2006

Contact: Gabriela Schneider 202-742-1520 ext 236

WASHINGTON, DC – Sunlight Labs (the technology development segment of the Sunlight Foundation) today is unveiling the “Popup Politicians” plugin on the SunlightFoundation.com website and plans to make the service available to other sites next week after further testing. Once the code is installed on a website, when users “mouse over” a Member of Congress’ name, a bubble will pop-up with links to information on that politician at Congresspedia.org, OpenSecrets.org, and WashingtonPost.com’s Votes Database. “Popup Politicians is an easy way for websites and blogs writing about politics to provide information and links to readers about their Members of Congress,” said Greg Elin, who heads Sunlight Labs. “It even has the politician’s photo. It’s like a digital baseball card for politicians, or special feature on a DVD – it adds a new level to any news story or blog entry.” Pop-Up Politicians was designed and built by Duncan Werner for Sunlight Labs. Werner is the former VP of Engineering at PubSub. More information can be found at http://www.sunlightlabs.com/popuppoliticians . Additional technical information is below. 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. Our ultimate goal of 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. ### Technical Information Popup Politicians is an AJAX-powered widget which contacts a remote database at Sunlight to retrieve a mini-profile and relevant links for a politician. The Javascript that powers the mouseover bubbles is served from Sunlight Labs server along with the mini-profile. Upon page load, the Javascript looks for Technorati-styled link tags for Members of Congress in the web page and dynamically modifies the links to add the mouseover bubble using data retrieved via AJAX from Sunlight Labs’ server. Various iterations of the widget are planned for increased scalability. The basic widget can be added to a web site or blog by simply adding the Javascript to the page's headers and adding a properly formed linked to each Members name in the HTML. Other types include local server-side PHP code to automatically search and replace Members of Congress' names with the necessary links. Sunlight has built a Drupal plugin for their own site and a WordPress 2.0 plugin. Plugins for the major blogging and CMS platforms are planned. The source code will be available under an open source license.