Sunlight Labs has announced its newest challenge: Apps for America!   Prizes go to developers who can use data from Sunlight and our partners that makes Congress more accountable, interactive and transparent.   Learn more and submit your idea.

What is Apps for America?

Apps for America is the latest mashup contest from The Sunlight Labs, Sunlight Foundation's open source development team. The mashup challenge focuses creating the best applications based on data from Sunlight and its partners that make Congress more accountable, interactive and transparent.

The grand prize is $15,000. Additionally, Sunlight is offering one second place award of $5,000, four third place awards of $1,000 each and 10 honorable mentions at $100 each. Entries must be applications that use a host of government information APIs or datasets, including the Sunlight Labs API, OpenSecrets.org API, the FollowtheMoney.org API, the Capitol Words API and other Sunlight APIs and datasets. Sunlight also encourages contestants to use Sunlight's code libraries, which the Labs recently open sourced.

How to Participate:

1. Contestants must join the Sunlight Labs Google Group
2. Entries must be applications that use one of these APIs or Datasets in their mashup
3. While not required, bonus points go to using one of Sunlight's open source libraries
4. All software you write has to be licensed under the MIT, New BSD or the GPL family of licenses
5. Submissions are due March 31st, 2009
   

Visit the Apps for America page for additional submission criteria.

For more information on participating in the Apps for America, check out the website here.   If you'd like to participate without submitting a project yourself, join the Google Group and help others.