The Sunlight Foundation, whose mission is to use cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable, have a really cool project called Elena’s Inbox that blends programming with public information surrounding Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan’s public record e-mails.
From their eNewsletter:
All of the emails sent and received by Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan during her time in the Clinton White House were recently put online, and one of Sunlight’s followers on Twitter had the idea for us to “put the just-released Kagan email dump into a Gmail-syle interface.”
It was a great idea. So we gave it a go.
One of our developers hacked away at it over the weekend and built a site to take Elena Kagan’s emails and make them readable just as they would be in Gmail – complete with emails categorized into “conversations” rather than just listed individually. It’s incredibly useful.
While we’re in the middle of Kagan’s hearing for the Supreme Court, it’s fascinating to get a sense of her through her public emails. And we already know it’s been useful for journalists and bloggers. [One White House reporter (jokingly) even suggested a Pulitzer Prize for the site. Ha!]
So we wanted to make sure to share Elena’s Inbox with all of you.
I poked around for a few minutes and outside of the sample searches, didn’t turn up anything too scandalous worth notifying CNN. However, this whole exercise did get me thinking about what the general public would think if they could see my entire e-mail history — especially the stupid YouTube videos I sent around earlier this week.
Check it out for yourself: http://elenasinbox.com