On Wednesday, April 6th, 2022, Congress held the Fourth Congressional Hackathon, co-hosted by Majority Leader Hoyer and Minority Leader McCarthy. This blogpost is a stub to gather information from the hackathon. We will update it when we have some time.
The format of the hackathon was:
1. Presentations: by Steve Dwyer, Majority Leader Hoyer, Minority Leader McCarthy, Matt Lira, and aneesh Chopra.
Then lightning talks by :
- Daniel Schuman – Bill Map Project, Finding Bills Within Bills
- Jonathan Rayner – Minerva Chrome Plugin, Member Relationships
- Lars Schonander – SenateCommitteeHearings.com, Committees
- Yuri Beckelman, ModCom Accomplishments
- Shaun Modi – Design Principles for Congress
- Ananda Bhatia – Flag Request Pizza Tracker
- Brian Overland – Approps Data Directory
- AJ Stewart – Personalized Legislative Portfolio
- Ken Ward – House Digital Service
- Casey Bishop & Chris Kimball – Quill, Member Letters
- David Tennent – The CNCT App, Staff Relationships
- Joseph Alessi – Director, Congressional App Challenge
- Jon Roberts – Open Innovation, Gov Prizes and Contests
- Steve Dwyer, Dome Directory 2.0 App, Member Memorization
- Ebtesam Al Haque & Muntaser Syed, Crowdsourcing Data for Congress
- Rachel Orey & Michael Thorning, Optimizing Committee Schedules
Hackathon participants then broke up into five groups to work on issues and report back their recommendations. The groups were: constituent communications, legislative data, constituent services and casework, cybersecurity, legislative information, and modernizing hearings.
My unedited notes from the proceedings are online here.
The last congressional hackathon was held way back in 2017. You can read our recap here. (And if you’re really feeling nostalgic, you can read our recaps of #1 and #2 too.) We also published ideas to be hacked on at the hackathon here.
