Sunlight Foundation

The Sunlight Foundation section deserved its own beat because, during 2010–2013, Sunlight was effectively the connective tissue of the federal open-government press community. The foundation, founded in 2006 by Ellen Miller and Mike Klein, was at its largest scale during this period: Influence Explorer (post-Citizens-United money tracking), OpenCongress (legislative data, in partnership with the Participatory Politics Foundation), the Sunlight API for Congress, the Political Party Time event-tracker, Politwoops (deleted-tweet tracking), and Inbox Influence (lobbying-correspondence cross-reference) were all live products.

Today in Open Government was Sunlight's daily blog roundup of federal-level transparency and accountability stories, structured around the disclosure-record streams Sunlight tracked most actively: lobbying disclosures filed under LD-2, congressional travel and personal-financial reports, OGE filings, FEC committee activity, and the FOIA-litigation docket. The Sunlight Weekly Roundup served the same surfacing function for state-level rollback tracking — Indiana, Hawaii, Wisconsin, Texas, Ohio, Florida — that no individual state's coverage made visible on its own.

Sunlight wound down its 2010-launched Reporting Group in 2016 and transitioned away from technology development soon after, with several of its products absorbed into other organisations and several discontinued. The 2010–2013 period this section covers was the foundation's most operationally active phase, and the daily / weekly cadence of its publishing was the schedule that connected the federal accountability data-work to the federal accountability journalism.