Sunlight Labs is having three "Hack-a-Thons" coming up. One at Transparency Camp, one at PyCon, and Web2.0 expo. Heck, a few of us are going to SxSW this year and we may do one there, too. Please vote on these ideas and let us know what you think we should be working on at these hack-a-thons. A note: we're naturally averse to advocacy type ideas. We'll likely not do them. It isn't that we don't believe in democracy though! It is because we're a c3 organization, and are legally prohibited in certain ways from doing very much in the form of advocacy.
Create a bookmarklet for a web browser that scrapes the page the user is on, looks for members of Congress on that page, and then provides information about those members of Congress and the relationships between them and the other subjects in the article (Could use something like Open Calais)
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This idea was developed in early 2008 by the Sunlight Labs team. The concept pulled from several private APIs and while the project was innovative, wasn't deemed stable or accurate enough for launch. The application involved posting unstructured text to a web page and showing connections between recognized corporate names and members of congress, and contributions between those entities. Unfortunately, Sunlight decided that more work needed to be done on Name Standardization before launch could be made. Results were too inaccurate and the project was tabled indefinitely.
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