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The Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan organization that uses the Internet to promote government transparency and openness, is celebrating its fifth anniversary this week. The foundation uses data analysis to report on government activity and trains journalists in the use of data to tell the story about what the federal government is actually up to.

We often cover the Sunlight Foundation and what they are doing. For the anniversary they sent a note to all their kindred spirits in the cause of open government. "We've grown from a small organization with big ideas to a connected community whose call for greater government openness and transparency is heard throughout the country," wrote Nicko Margolies, communications coordinator at the Sunlight Foundation.

The United States Senate has announced that it will release expenditure data online for the first time ever, later this year. The release will be made by the end of November, two months after the six month period it covers has ended. Two and a half years after legislation requiring the data to be released was passed. In PDF format. (PDF is famously known as "where data goes to die.")

When the UK government released hundreds of thousands of pages of expense reports from its legislators two years ago, the news organization The Guardian organized a public campaign to split up all the records and hunt for notable disclosures. The publication referred to the heavily redacted records as "Blackoutgate" and "the great sleaze-hunt" in which "we humble taxpayers continue to plough through the sorry trough that is the MPs' expense claims to find out what they've been spending our money on."