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Concerned about the dubious practices occurring in the US Congress, data and information specialist Ellen Miller and Washington businessman Mike Klein knew something needed to be done to expose shady politicians.

After weeks of talks with investigative journalists and experts who said more information about what happens in parliamentary offices was needed, the pair decided to start the Sunlight Foundation.

"We think the citizens who are networked through the Sunlight site plus information technology have the opportunity to create a new force for uncovering congressional wrong doing and to force congress to become more transparent," said Miller, the foundation's executive director.

With Klein's help as the organization's principle financial backer and Miller heading up an expanding team of journalists as well as political, economic and technology experts, the Sunlight Foundation opened its doors in April.

"Our focus is on getting more information in a way that citizens can use it and help us produce it," Miller said. "Transparency in the Internet age seems to be a no-brainer, that's why we've moved in this direction."

Judging politicians' motives

The direction the foundation has consistently provided independent information about member of the US Congress, said BOBs English-language jury member Lisa Stone, explaining the site's importance.

"More than ever, American voters need help judging the decisions and motivations of Congress," she said, praising the foundation's work. "The Sunlight Foundation's citizen watchblogs have raised the standard of transparency and accountability for elected representatives.

"The result? Voter empowerment and an opportunity to get more involved in running this country -- whatever your politics," Stone added.

One of the first ways the foundation got the public involved was in checking on their representatives came with the help of mainly conservative bloggers, Miller said.

Coordinating the public's efforts

When a secret hold was placed on a US Senate bill requiring the government to make a database of all its grants and contracts kept the legislation from moving forward, blogges and the public got upset and the Sunlight.

"Bloggers said, 'What it is this secrecy? We need transparency' and engaged citizens in calling every single member of the United States Senate, who were then asked, 'Are you the one who has the secret hold on the bill?'" said Miller. The Sunlight Foundation then collated the material.

"Eventually the two members, one Democrat and one Republican, who both had holds on the bill were smoked out by citizens so that piece of legislation went through," she said.

But the political process turned what initially looked like a victory for transparency to a loophole-ridden law, Miller added.

"We learned that rules can be written to which there are too many exemptions," she said. "We won't be fooled by that again."

International application possible

Since the foundation's first advances into the legislative machine, it has grown to be able to finance other organizations to create and publish additional databases that shed light elected representatives' actions.

The relative ease of connecting to each other and their elected representatives is one of the key factors behind the Sunlight Foundation's success and could be easily adapted for use in other countries, according to Miller.

"The biggest technology piece of this is simply the use of the internet to create quite simple databases and putting them on the Internet for people to use," Miller said. "There's nothing fancy or very sophisticated about this."