new widgets track the Congressional money race

[Dan Newman]

We just released widgets to track all 1,500 candidates for Congress.
More details and examples are at http://www.maplight.org/node/193

Best,
Dan Newman
MAPLight.org

BERKELEY, CA - Citizens can now track fundraising for over 1,500
congressional candidates with free widgets for blogs, social
networking pages, and personal web sites. MAPLight.org, a nonpartisan
watchdog group, released today customizable widgets - portable chunks
of code that allow content to be displayed on any web page - that make
political fundraising more transparent. Bloggers and reporters will be
able to easily share the campaign finance data for any number of
congressional races with their audiences.

"Congressional candidates are competing in increasingly expensive
election campaigns, and we want to make it easy to see the huge
amounts of money candidates received from private contributors."

- Dan Newman, Executive Director, MAPLight.org

The congressional money race widgets follow MAPLight.org's August
release of presidential money race widgets that allow users to track
funds raised by presidential candidates. Citizens can use the widget
to show money raised for one Congressional race, to view all
candidates in their home state, or to view House and Senate races from
across the country, in any combination desired.

The free congressional and presidential money race widgets are funded
by MAPLight.org's $25,000 first prize win at the NetSquared Innovation
awards, a contest for the best nonprofit technology project worldwide,
and by the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington, DC-based foundation
dedicated to open government.

MAPLight.org also provides insider access to Federal Elections
Commission (FEC) data. The nonprofit group publishes an Application
Programming Interface (API) that makes it easy for any Web developer
to build their own site or software program to share up-to-date
campaign contributions from the FEC.

About MAPLight.org

MAPLight.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based in
Berkeley, California. Its search engine at MAPLight.org illuminates
the connection between money and politics (MAP) via an unprecedented
database of campaign contributions and legislative outcomes.