This time, we highlight a project launched by Candace Moix and Julie Lin, two alumnae of the TechCongress program, to provide a free, robust digital advocacy platform called MyCapitol.ai. AGI supports leveling the informational playing field when it comes to Congress, so this is a very exciting project not only for under-resourced advocacy groups and nonprofits, but congressional staff, too.
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For this issue of Make Space, 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.
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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.
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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.
Continue readingThe Government Publishing Office grabbed the spotlight at the Congressional Data Task Force meeting on December 13 by announcing that it is launching a Model Context Protocol server for artificial intelligence tools to access official GPO publication information. The MCP server lets AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini pull in official GPO documents when answering questions.
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A key way to understanding the influence and position of different factions within the Democratic Caucus and Republican Conference in the House of Representatives is to study the major ideologically-based caucuses that almost all members join. Tracking caucuses’ members within the institution is hampered, however, by the lack of membership information in data provided by the House. Although most caucuses publish their rosters on their websites, the absence of that information in available structured member biographical data makes using it in congressional research laborious.
Continue readingCongress will convene the next Congressional Data Task Force on Tuesday, Dec. 9, from 2-4 p.m. ET. The meeting will be hybrid — you may join virtually or attend in person in the Longworth Building. To participate please RSVP at this link.
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The Congressional Hackathon that took place this past Constitution Day on September 17, 2025, is a rarity in today’s Washington. Civic minded citizens joined with congressional staff in a day-long discussion inside the U.S. Capitol on strengthening Congress by improving and democratizing its technology. More information from the event, including video and a report, will be published on the Legislative Branch Innovation Hub.
The bipartisan nature of these events is a recurring theme, with senior Republicans and Democrats always offering opening remarks and providing space and support inside Congress. Indeed, the Speaker broke news at the Hackathon, announcing the House would be distributing up to 6,000 user licenses to congressional staff to use Microsoft’s M365 Copilot AI-powered chatbot for a year.
This is the seventh such Congressional Hackathon, with the first organized back in 2011. This iteration also was the fourth annual event in a row. I’ve been to them all and this event brought forth a groundswell of energy. Some of it came from the new coding breakout session, where almost 90 participants built tools side-by-side with congressional staff that provide insight and services to people in Congress, across government, and around the country. It reminded me of the civil society-organized hackathons of the 2010s that had so much energy and potential. We all owe a debt of appreciation to Speaker Johnson, Democratic Leader Jeffries, and CAO Catherine Szpindor for co-hosting.
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One important project catalyzed by the 2025 Congressional Hackathon was the coming together of a Legislative branch data map, the existence of which had been requested by Appropriators. The map is an effort to identify across the Legislative branch the different sources for congressional data and drew rhetorical inspiration from the 2013 executive order on making open and machine readable the new default for government information, the 2018 Open Government Data Act, and advocacy from public-interest minded groups.
The map data was seeded from my 2023 biased yet reliable guide to sources of information and data about congress and collaborations from governmental members of the Congressional Data Task Force, although its GitHub repository quickly drew pull requests from hackathon participants as well. In other words, anyone can suggest items to add to the list of Legislative branch data sources and that list can point to official and non-official sources for data. The map improves the findability of information and makes it discoverable when someone has done the hard work to refine that information into a useful format.
Here is where you can find and suggest edits to the Legislative Branch Data Map, version 0.1.
The Library of Congress will hold its annual Congress.gov Public Forum on September 30th, 2025, from 1-3:30 PM ET. The hybrid forum will allow people to attend in person at the Library of Congress’s Jefferson building or online. Here is how to RSVP.
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