Maker Space is a semi-regular new feature to spotlight the community of people inside and outside Congress who are tinkering with different legislative datasets and code to produce useful tools. The intent is to build awareness of these projects – large and small – to build that community and help people find out about cool stuff.

For this time, we highlight Capitol Labs’ comprehensive congressional hearing database. It’s the work of Jason Lemons, former VP at Prolegis and House staffer. Lemons described the project to me as an experiment in assembling a comprehensive set of data related to hearings under one hood. It builds upon what is available from the Library of Congress via Congress.gov APIs and committee videos to make the record of the hearing much more accessible and allow for analysis in ways that only otherwise exist on expensive subscription platforms.

Our first featured project is from one of the legends in congressional data and data journalism, Derek Willis of the Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. This spring, he released Congress Press, a spiffy update of his efforts to collect and share congressional members’ press releases he first started at ProPublica.

The community of people inside and outside Congress who are tinkering with different legislative datasets and code to produce useful tools is growing rapidly. It’s a sign of the success of efforts like the Congressional Data Task Force and Congressional Hackathon and open mindedness of stakeholders across the House and Senate to encourage experimentation. That community is still somewhat decentralized, though, so discovering new projects can be a challenge.

To that end, we’re starting a new semi-regular series to highlight individual projects large and small called Maker Space to build greater awareness of the cool stuff out there.