FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 30, 2009
Contact: Gabriela Schneider 202/742-1520 ext 236
Washington, DC - Today, the Sunlight Foundation launched Transparency Corps, a Web service that enables citizens to help create greater government transparency by performing small, discrete tasks to analyze and enhance the usefulness of government data. Sunlight’s Transparency Corps aggregates simple actions—such as evaluating lawmakers’ earmark requests—that require human intelligence, but not specialized political knowledge. Sunlight demonstrated the new, open source site at the annual Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York.
“Inspired by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Sunlight created Transparency Corps as a new way for people to volunteer to make government transparency a reality,” said Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation. “Now, when people ask ‘how can I help?’ Sunlight and future partners can provide micro-tasks that when aggregated, help solve research and data analysis problems when computers alone cannot properly scrutinize government information.”
Transparency Corps now allows volunteers to participate in two campaigns organized by Sunlight. These campaigns give volunteers tasks to show support for Sunlight’s call for Congress to post bills online before consideration and to pool knowledge about lawmakers’ earmarks requests. In the future, other organizations can collaborate with Sunlight to use the Transparency Corps service to distribute public research projects. Additionally, Sunlight encourages other organizations to use the open source code that powers Transparency Corps to create their own services for aggregating volunteer actions.
The Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan nonprofit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency. Visit SunlightFoundation.com to learn more about Sunlight’s projects, including The Open Senate Project, Capitol Words and OpenCongress.
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