We are excited to announce that the Sunlight Foundation has joined a coalition of government watchdog groups launching a
revolutionary new online tool, called Government Documents
[http://governmentdocs.org] that gives anyone with an Internet
connection the power to investigate the federal government.

Starting today, you can browse, search and help us review
documents we receive from the government, and root out instances
of illegal and unethical behavior. Utilizing the combined power of thousands of individuals working together to search and review
documents we can collectively sort through hundreds of thousands
of pages, discover new information and expose it for all to see
and read.

Sunlight is proud to have funded Government Documents, a project
of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
The innovative tool CREW has developed is pioneering in its use of Web 2.0 technology to give citizens the power to review once
obscure FOIA documents. Governmentdocs.org will serve as a
valuable resource as a part of Sunlight's ongoing efforts to make
Congress transparent by making Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
requests for documents and information from the federal
government.

Just last week, Sunlight's Real Time Investigations
[http://realtime.sunlightprojects.org] project posted thousands of pages of documents we received as part of our work to shed light on the relationship between Congress and federal agencies by obtaining monthly correspondence logs of letters sent by members of Congress to over 100 federal agencies.

The new Government Documents Web site is a quantum leap in opening up our government because in the past, when we received documents in response to its FOIA requests, the only way we were able share them with the public was by posting huge PDF files on our Web site. Now, with the new "Government Documents" system, not only can you help us search and tag these documents, but every page of every document will have its own unique URL so that you can link to a particular page from your blog, forward interesting nuggets that you find to your friends, or share pages on sites like Digg and Reddit.

Perhaps even more powerful is the fact that every document has
also gone through an optical character recognition (OCR) process,
so that the text of the documents is searchable, even though most
of our documents came to us as image files, or even worse, plain
paper.

Search and review documents at GovernmentDocs.org today!
[http://governmentdocs.org]