We are excited to announce a new partnership with the Sunlight Foundation! The Sunlight Foundation is the national leader in government transparency and accountability. Their focus is on the digitization of government data and the creation of tools and web sites to make that data easily accessible for all people. Sunlight has funded and advanced some amazing projects, including Open Congress, FollowTheMoney and OpenSecrets. Their internal development team, Sunlight Labs, also runs several online programs to foster transparency, including Apps for America, the Congress Android App and The Fifty State Project. Check out all their projects here.
So, what are we working on? First off, Sunlight has given us a mini-grant. The grant will help our team develop new data scrapers for the City of New Orleans ordinances and Home Rule Charter as well as other technology upgrades and features. Additionally, PolicyPitch will be integrating their state legislative data from the Fifty State Project. Once complete, this will allow our users to track local legislation in all fifty states! For most of Sunlight’s history, their initiatives have primarily focused on Congressional and federal level transparency and disclosure. This Sunlight – PolicyPitch partnership begins to move digital transparency to the state and local level and helps improve citizen engagement and influence.
PolicyPitch and Sunlight are also both dedicated to open source principles. Accordingly, all of the information available on our site will (eventually) be opened up to any of our users to view, utilize, mashup, or otherwise use at their discretion. We are very excited to be working with Sunlight and look forward to the next set of updates to the site! Stay tuned!
Thank you for the very important work you guys are doing. It’s great to be partnering with y’all!