As a non-partisan, non-profit organization, the Sunlight Foundation is taking the ethos found among the open-source software movement and applying it to government. It's one goal is to publish the government's public data in an easy-to-access location, at no cost to users.

Unlike similar services, its data is free. The foundation says its work is for the benefit of concerned citizens and investigative journalists.

By putting the U.S. government's data online to create more transparency and accountability, Washington, D.C.-based non-profit Sunlight Foundation is making public data more accessible for American citizens. It sounds like a tall order, but the company's ambitions have always been high.

"The co-founder and president, Mike Klein, originally wanted to create something like the Pulitzer award," says Gabriela Schneider, Sunlight Foundation's communications director. "He met with Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and others, and they told him that another award would be great, but if you're starting something new, focus on digitizing data and putting it online."

And that's just what the foundation did. The Sunlight Foundation runs Sunlight Labs, an open-source group of developers that makes new digital tools for users to explore the government's data. Not just the federal government, either — Sunlight Labs is working on the "Open State Project," applying the same public access objective to the governments of all 50 states.

The Sunlight Foundation also runs Sunlight Reporting Group, a collection of journalists who cover open government. This specific project also incorporates a teaching element to the company by showing other journalists how to become data hounds, sniffing out stories from mounds of raw government information.

Aside from serving as a source of government data and a reporting organization, the Sunlight Foundation serves a third critical role: think tank. It advocates for policies that make government more "open and transparent" — it wants government data more easily searched, and it calls for data to be made available in real-time.

"There’s a whole cottage industry of places that sell subscriptions so you can follow legislation, lobbying efforts and campaign contributions where they take government info and provide it for a fee," says Schneider. "We were founded with the ethos of turning that upside on its head. We want as many eyes as possible on [government] information, so that we can all make sense of it together."

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sjlocke

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