A few weeks ago, I sat down Clay Johnson, the Director of Sunlight Labs. Sunlight Labs is part of the Sunlight Foundation, an organization that is working toward bringing transparency in government. Sunlight Foundation has been known to fund and support developers and groups that are pushing the edges to keep government honest with themselves and the American People.
During my meeting with Clay, I asked him how I could help the Labs reach their mission. The group currently has made available a set of APIs developed internally and with partners, that bring information like lobby dollars, campaign contributions and Congressional committee information and make it available for third party developers to build applications against. Clay noted that they had a library for their API for Python and Ruby, but none for PHP.
Based on that conversation, I set about creating the first iteration of a PHP class for their APIs. I’m proud to announce that Version 1.0 is now stable! Version 1.0 has full support for the entire Sunlight Labs API as well as the OpenSecrets API.
Just in time too. Sunlight has just announced the Apps for America 2 competition which seeks to utilize the data sources at the new federal Data.gov. The winner will receive a $10,000 prize.
While version 1.0 of this project does not support the Data.gov data sources (not provided via a RESTful interface or it would), bonus points are given for using Sunlight’s APIs.
So if you’re a PHP developer, download this library and start hacking up a killer app.
About Aaron Brazell
