IRE was a collaborator on a grant that the Sunlight Foundation had gotten from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation a couple of years ago. As time progressed our two organizations agreed that it would be great to create a resource for journalists and citizens that could help them understand how economic data are created and provide direct links to those data sets. We all know that economic issues would be a big deal in the 2012 elections, so the project made sense to us.