Sunlight Empowers Internet Entrepreneurs with Mini-grants

February 14, 2008

Contact: Gabriela Schneider 202-742-1520 ext 236

WASHINGTON, DC -Today, the Sunlight Foundation is announcing new mini-grants as part of its commitment to support original ideas, tools, Web sites, and bloggers that further the organization's mission of using the Internet to foster a more open government.

"The projects Sunlight is funding today demonstrate new ways citizens are creatively using the Internet to give the public the power to learn more about their elected representatives," said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation. "All of these new Sunlight grantees create greater transparency about elected officials and will strengthen citizen participation in the democratic process."

The grants being announced today are:

$5,000 to 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 will support 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. This grant will 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.

$5,000 to Pacific Northwest Topic Hotlist. 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 will provide funding for Web hosting services for this news aggregator site and its accompanying widgets.

$2,500 to Richmond Sunlight. The Richmond Sunlight Web site monitors the activity of the Virginia legislature. Sunlight's mini-grant will support 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. This grant will 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. This grant will 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.

The Sunlight Foundation supports, develops and deploys new Internet technologies to make information about Congress and the federal government more accessible to the American people. 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.

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