Sunlight Foundation: Shining some light on our government

When I first stumbled on The Sunlight Foundation I automatically thought it was a liberal leaning thing disguised to be a bi-partisan watchdog of the U.S. Government.  I’m not so sure my initial impressions were right.  So, having a second cup of coffee I dug a little deeper to look at their “projects”:

• Read The Bill @ http://readthebill.org/ is about a grassroots campaign to require “Congress to post all bills online for 72 hours before they are debated. That gives members of Congress – and you – three days to read legislation and consider how it could potentially affect each of us in our daily lives.”
• Open Congress @ http://www.opencongress.org/ “brings together official government data with news articles, blog coverage, and public comments to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress. OpenCongress is a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement.
• Earmark Watch @ http://earmarkwatch.org/ is a site dedicated to looking at congressional earmarks from 2008 and links to another site who is doing the same work for earmarks on bills for 2009.

Reading these changed my mind that perhaps, for once, there is a group that cares about how our government is working for it’s citizens, for the people and by the people, regardless of political affiliation.  Now that really is a ray of sunshine.  You can read all about The Sunshine Foundation and the many projects they are doing to keep government accountable to the people by clicking to their site here.