Turning Government Data Into Usable Information

  • idea is born
  • government data is a mess
  • developer takes messy data and converts it into user friendly code
  • our products are put back out for the public to see and use

Featured Projects

  • Sunlight Labs API

    Basic information on members of Congress, legislator IDs used by various Web sites, and lookups between places and the politicians that represent them to facilitate mashups involving politicians and the various other APIs that are out there.

  • django-brainstorm

    Django-brainstorm is our open source voting application that allows us to take feedback on ideas. We're using it on our FEC ideas page our hackathons page and our open government list. You can host multiple feedback pages on the same server and use Django's templating engine to incorporate different styles for each page.

Recent Posts

  1. Help Sunlight Build Our FEC Testimony

    Comments: 0
    Written by Clay
    Date: June 26 2009

    Yesterday, the FEC posted a 46 page PDF file to its website asking for comments on the FEC.gov website. We've taken the entire PDF and put it up online for easy perusal. You can email the comments in to improvefecinternet@fec.gov, or send them in to the FEC via mail. But to make it really easy, we're launching our FEC Brainstorm today to solicit comments to submit to the FEC. We'll take the best comments that are submitted and include them in our testimony, with attribution of course.

    Read More

  2. Recovery.gov Bid -- a Good Failure

    Comments: 19
    Written by Clay
    Date: June 25 2009

    Last week, we announced that we were going to bid on Recovery.gov. Here, 9 days later we have a few pages of information on our bid, but I don't think it makes sense to turn anything in tomorrow. So I'm declaring this experiment a failure. Most people confuse "failure" with being "wrong" but here in the Labs, we're into experimentation -- and you can't experiment or push the ball forward if you're afraid to fail.

    This was a completely worthwhile experiment and we've learned a lot. I want to share some of the reasons why we failed, and what we've learned with all of you:

    Read More

Read more posts in our blog archive.

Want to Help?

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Apps for America

Apps for America 2