Sunlight Labs is the technology arm of the Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan non-profit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency. Since our founding in the spring of 2006, Sunlight has assembled and funded an array of web-based databases and tools including OpenCongress.org, Congresspedia.org, FedSpending.org, OpenSecrets.org, EarmarkWatch.org and LOUISdb.org. In December 2008 we shifted our focus to be more community-driven and adopted a formal policy of open sourcing all of the code we produce. In the last few months we have open sourced approximately a dozen projects ranging from reusable Django applications to sites like http://publicmarkup.org, with many more in the works.

We have also started to engage the developer community more actively through events like our Apps for America developer contest and with upcoming scheduled hackathons at PyCon in Chicago as well as Gov 2.0 Expo in San Francisco as well as our large community project to produce scrapers/parsers for all fifty state legislatures. Over a few months, Sunlight Labs has grown from a development team of 8 to a community now of 360 developers and designers building projects to open the legislative and executive branches of the federal and state governments.

We had a lot of excellent proposals but could only accept a few. This is our first year doing Google Summer of Code and hope to expand our involvement in the future.  If you submitted a proposal and were not accepted we'd love for you to remain a part of our community as there are always more opportunities to contribute and becoming an active member will help your chances in the future.