Transparency Corps

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Help Us Make the Government More Transparent

Transparency Corps is the Sunlight Foundation's answer to the question, "How can I help?".

There are many big problems that we can solve with technology, but we can't solve them all. For many of the projects that make government transparency a reality, human eyes and analysis are required. With Transparency Corps, we break those tasks down into short, small actions that make a BIG difference. Join the Corps, and let's get started!

• Kentucky Vote Collection

  points 5

  54%

  46% To Go

  Legislative votes are at the very core of our democracy, yet many state legislatures only make them available in the form of PDFs that are difficult for computers to parse. This makes it impossible to aggregate these votes and present them in an easy-to-use manner.

  Citizens can't make informed decisions without having a way to find out how their state legislators are voting on issues important to them. In order to make legislative voting data readily available to everyone, we need your help digitizing this information, starting with results from the Kentucky Legislature.

• How Many Votes?

  points 5

  37%

  63% To Go

  Help Sunlight Labs gather the numbers on how well our nation's legislators did in their last elections. The answers are scattered over 50 different state websites, so we'll point you to the right one and let you dig it up.

  We're looking for the win percentage, vote totals, and the year of their last election. We'll be publishing the data in its raw form, and using it in a couple of places, including Congrelate and some upcoming work.

• Find Your State Officials on Twitter

  points 5

  60%

  40% To Go

  Thanks to websites like TweetCongress, and technical services like the Sunlight Labs API, it's become easier than ever to follow your federal representatives and elected officials on Twitter, and keep the lines of dialogue open.

  Finding state-level elected officials, however, is not so easy. There's really no comprehensive website or map to find it, and we'd like to change that.

  To help us, we're asking you to use your Internet search-fu skills to track down who among your state officials is on Twitter, and what their usernames are. Don't know who your state officials are? No problem, you tell us your zip code, and we'll tell you who to look for.