The Web is home to a rich array of original source data from government agencies, think tanks and nonprofits. There are powerful tools that cost absolutely nothing to use that allow even the least technically proficient journalist to quickly search, sift, mine and analyze it. We’ll show you where to find all kinds of data–from government contracts to tariff suspensions, from the latest data on the multi-trillion dollar effort to shore up the banking system to the smallest earmark in the omnibus–that allow you to find out what’s going on in Washington. We’ll also teach you how to use some very simple tools that allow you to quickly navigate huge documents on deadline, to parse legislation down to the paragraph, to analyze columns of numbers and even to do simple mapping and visualizations. Bill Allison, a veteran investigative journalist and a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, leads the two-hour session that points to data sources and provides hands on training on tools.