Maplight: shining a light on politics and money from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Sean Tanner, research director of MAPLight.org, talks about how the organization provides transparency to the political donations system through widgets that tap into pubic information databases. We spoke at the NetSquared conference in San Jose, Calif., in May 2008, where MAPLight won top honors last year.

Here’s the current Presidential Money Race Widget, one of several widgets you can customize:

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