This is a great collection pulled together by Sunlight of the places people can pull back the curtain on government activities, policy creation.  This is like a web2.0 tour of the sausage factory that is US government.

These are cool because we are just starting to get our heads around how to present megadata sets and any look at US government usually needs a way to start at the the 30,000ft level and then zoom in because there is just so many transactions to track.

Without these type of mashups and aggregation sites looking at government programs one policy, one staffer, one donation at a time is like trying to understand weather patterns by looking at one raindrop.  We need to see the landscape, the clouds, feel the wind, etc.

We need the aggregate traffic patterns Sunlight is teasing out of the government data so each of us can better plot our routes to get things done.

Insanely Useful Web Sites | Sunlight Foundation

The following sites and resources are “insanely useful Web sites” for government transparency. They provide a broad range of information available to track government and legislative information, campaign contributions and the role of money in politics.

Many of these resources apply the Web 2.0 ethos to sift, share and combine this information in innovative ways – often times by mashing data together from disparate sources to maximize the usability of that information.