Founded in January 2006, the mission of the Sunlight Foundation is to strengthen the relationship between lawmakers and their constituents by maximizing transparency of the work of Congress, its members, staff and lobbyists. Sunlight believes transparency helps reduce corruption, ensures greater accountability, and fosters public trust in this vital institution of democracy.
Working through grants to other non-profit groups, and through its own activities and web sites, the Sunlight Foundation's emphasis is the use of Internet technology to make millions of bits of information available online about the members of Congress, their staff and lobbyists. This information includes political contributions and expenditures, lobbyists expenditures and activities, changes in the net worth, travel and entertainment and legislative activity of members of Congress. The Sunlight Foundation has also fostered such projects as Congresspedia, the Open House Project, OpenCongress.or g and the "Is Congress a Family Business?" distributed investigation. Its Sunlight Labs is a leading innovative force on the cutting edge of the intersection of technology and politics.
Sunlight's work is committed to helping citizens, journalists and bloggers be their own best watchdogs, both by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and web sites to enable all of us to pool our intelligence in new, and yet to be imagined, ways.