Guest post by Bonnie Bogle, general manager of operations at Development Seed.

This morning AfghanistanElectionData.com launched, providing an open data and open government vantage point into a controversial’election.

The site is a data browser that shows the raw results from the August 20th presidential election in Afghanistan, using the data released in mid-September that gave Karzai a 54% lead.

It was first’used internally by the National Democratic Institute to help their team plan for a runoff election, which was called off, and make assessments about voting patterns. With planning already beginning for a new round of Afghan elections for the provincial council (Wolesi Jirga ) this coming year, NDI decided to open up this application to the public to allow everyone to see the problem areas in the country and to start a dialog around how to reduce fraud and increase participation the next time around.

The main underlying tool that powers this site is ManagingNews.com, which was funded by the Knight Foundation this summer and just released in September. This is a great example of why we invest in open source applications – we never know who is going to build off them to make the next great site.

Check the site out in detail.