Thomas Jefferson memorably said, "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government," but these days a big part of the problem with that admirable notion is that we're glutted with information and it's hard to take it all in, let alone stay focused. And it's clear that lots of bad and dumb stuff gets done by people in power because they think--or know--that the rest of us aren't paying attention.

Along with my partner-in-crime Andrew Rasiej, I've been spending a lot of time lately helping the newly-created Sunlight Foundation figure out how we might be able to harness the internet and the social web to tackle this problem, with the goal of shining more light on Congress and Washington. One answer we've come up with is to create tools to help civicly-minded bloggers steer readers toward rich sources of information, precisely when those readers are actually thinking about a specific Member of Congress or bill. And the first iteration of that idea is now live. It's called the "Pop-Up Politician".

The Pop-Up Politician is a widget (an AJAX-based bit of code) that adds mini-profiles of Members of Congress to a web page that appear when you run your mouse over the link. The tool actually creates a small "sun" symbol next to the Member's name, and the Pop-Up doesn't appear unless you mouse over it. It looks like this:

The links inside the Pop-Up go to the Member's page in Congresspedia (which is a wiki that Sunlight helped create that includes a great deal of factual and critical information on each Member), to their career campaign finance profile page on OpenSecrets.org, and to their current voting record as tracked by the Washington Post's Votes Database. To see an example of the Pop-Ups in action, go here.

It's actually quite easy to add a Pop-Up to any blog post if you want to do it by hand. First, you need to add a line of script to your site's header template, that reads: "<script src="http://sunlightlabs.com/popuppoliticians/sunlightpopups.js"></script>". Then, if say you wanted the link to work on something you had written about Senator Edward Kennedy, you'd wrap this bit of html around his name in your blog post: "<a href="http://sunlightlabs.com/tag/Sen.+Edward+M.+Kennedy" rel="tag">Sen. Edward M. Kennedy</a>".

If you want more details on how this works, go to the Sunlight Labs or send an email to my colleague Greg Elin, the Labs co-director. (gelin-at-sunglightfoundation-dot-com). The Labs is working on additional features, including local server-side PHP code to automatically search and replace Members of Congress's names with the necessary links. Sunlight has built a Drupal plugin that does this its own site, and also built a WordPress 2.0 plugin as well. Plugins for the major blogging and CMS platforms are planned and SunlightLabs is eager to find open source developers to help accomplish this and extend the the plugin. And we're happy to help individual bloggers and news sites figure out how to install Pop-Up Politician on their own sites. (We're talking with TPM Cafe's techies about doing that here, in fact.)

Imagine reading about a politician on the web, and being offered real-time pointers to who is their prime backers, or to the latest investigative story about them. That's the power of the Pop-up Politician tool. Or so we hope. What do you think?