Sunlight Foundation Receives $4m For Obama Era Data Visualization
The Sunlight Foundation, one of the coolest geek organizations on the Internet, announced today that it has added $4 million to its budget compliments of the Omidyar Network, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's group. Sunlight works with government information made publicly available to turn it into websites and services that anyone can find useful.
At the start of what could be the most open US Presidential administrations in decades, the Sunlight Foundation's work should be more potent, interesting and useful in fostering accountability than ever before.
We've written about the group's work on multiple occasions and would suggest checking out the OpenCongress.org project first if Sunlight is new to you. That site puts congressional data into a full-featured and strikingly usable interface for tracking policies, politicians and issues.
After eight years of Bush era secrecy, an Obama era Sunlight should have far more fodder to work with. The group's work should be just as important as ever; the new administration is just as in need of accountability around things like corporate influence and human rights policies as any other before it.
The Omidyar Network has a long history of funding experimental new projects on the web, from nonprofit grants like this one for Sunlight to investments in ground-breaking private companies like Digg, Seesmic, Wikia and Linden Labs.
Today's is the third round of funding Omidyar has provided Sunlight, bringing the Foundation's total support for the group to $8 million.
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Great news! It's too bad Obama lied about transparency and is shaping up to be as bad or worse than Bushie in this department. Check out the Obama Deception on Youtube.
This is fantastic news! Good on Omidyar.
The work you are doing and the funding provided by the Omidyar Network to further that work is exemplary. But we have to think bigger. The internet allows us for the first time in histroy to actually contemplate self-government on a grand scale. Why not do it? Why not draw up a web app that will give We, the People, a voice in our democracy. Allow all to speak and all to be accurately heard by our elected leaders?