Calling all ad sleuths - join us for National Data Happy Hour

[Scott S.]

Sunlight and some of our partners in effort to find out who’s behind 2012’s blitz of political advertising, this is crunch time. We’re on an ambitious quest to put information in thousands of ad filings at the Federal Communications Commission into a searchable, sortable format so that researchers, journalists and average Americans can begin to figure out who is behind this year’s extraordinary barrage of propaganda and how much they’re paying.

This is information all Americans will want to know next year when the chits are called in. And we can’t succeed in unearthing it without your help.

This Thursday, Sunlight we’ll be sponsoring a data happy hour to introduce users to our Political Ad Sleuth database -- how to read the files that you find there and how to enter the data into a format that will make it easier for us to search and provide computations on ad spending.

We’ll be providing food and drink for the body and mind beginning at 5 p.m. in Sunlight’s offices, just south of Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. More details here. And Boston Sunlight Meetup will be hosting data-busters as well (details here). Our partners at Free Press will be doing the same at their offices in western Massachusetts. More details on that event here.

I hope you will join us!

Thanks,

Scott

PS - Don’t live in DC or the Bay State? You can still join the fun. We’ll be livestreaming the event on our interactive video tool, Sunlight Live.