March 3, 2025

Congressional Hackathon 6.0

Congressional Hackathon 6.0 took place on September 19, 2024 at the U.S. Capitol, co-hosted by Speaker Mike Johnson, Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Chief Administrative Officer Catherine Szpindor. The event brought together congressional stakeholders to explore the role of digital platforms in the legislative process. After the event, organizers released video from the full proceedings as well as a highlights reel, and are expected to release a report summarizing the proceedings. You can find official resources on previous hackathons here.

At the bottom of this blogpost are our summaries of all the previous hackathons as well as links to the official reports and video. This time, instead of writing a summary of the event, I’m pasting in my notes. They’re imperfect, but can serve as an institutional memory of what transpired. I could have an AI transform this into well crafted prose, but it’s not quite up to the job… yet.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson

  • Use new tools to serve Congress better
  • Since 2011 worked to make congressional data publicly available, digital signatures for releases, and ease pain points like committee schedules
  • Build bridges between private sector and government
  • Look beyond the familiar and think differently
  • Maybe a better way to communicate and schedule with constituents, or protect our data, or make documents easier to read and access
  • Build a 21st century Congress
  • How can we use AI?
  • Chair of the House bipartisan task force on artificial intelligence has a tech background with a masters in AI
  • AI is both a benefit and a danger

ModCom Chair/RM Derek Kilmer

  • Discusses the history of modernization committee efforts
  • Model how to do things differently – part of the rationale behind the hackathon
  • Committee favorably reported more than 200 recommendations
  • Rec 181– keep doing the hackathons
  • Lots of tech recs: offer tech tools to facilitate member collaboration
  • To bring on industry leading correspondence products
  • House should consider using code developed by outside civil tech orgs
  • A platform for committees to solicit public comment
  • Several recs on calendar. Last year, the idea of a centralized House calendar was born, and recently HouseCal has come to life. That came out of the hackathon.
  • Congress should welcome more ideas on a more regular basis – about to introduce a resolution to create a congressional modernization competition. Ideas should come from folks everywhere – it would allow the House to encourage students to participate in civic life.
  • Big areas to grapple with: AI 

Chair Jay Obernolte

  • Chair of House Task Force on AI (along with Ted Lieu)
  • By the end of the year – need a report for a federal regulatory framework for A
  • (He’s also a software developer)
  • If we can use AI to make gov’t more efficient, has broad impact b/c of size of fed’l spending

CAO Catherine Szpindor

  • CAO is pleased to co-sponsor events, thanks the folks involved with this process
  • Continue the mission of modernizing Congress
  • Focus: an event that would bring innovative ideas to Congress
  • Most of top recommendations from last year’s hackathon have been implemented: a new centralized House calendar; roll out member social media tracker; new online staff directory.
  • Have standardized all house digital videos, casework with electronic signatures, a non-partisan resource database organized by position that staff can find from the CAO coach website
  • Notes congressional app challenge group

Congressional App Challenge

  • Joe Alessi
  • 58,000 students have participated in the app challenge since 2015
  • 7 former app challengers will be presenting today as part of the lightning pitches

Steny Hoyer

  • Appropriately praises Steve Dwyer
  • Thanks Katherine Szpindor
  • 6th hackathon in us capitol
  • Bipartisan initiative
  • Cites staff directory; comparative print project; handle earmarks
  • Many technologies pioneered by Steve Dwyer
  • Pleased to have institutionalized the event; thank you for Kilmer
  • (written remarks here)

Lightning Talks – Ananda Bhatia

  • Many applicants
  • 3 minutes per presentation

John Witty – CMS add-on to help with Whistleblowers

  • Office focused on helping member offices receive communications from whistleblowers
  • Idea: “Working with Whistleblowers Concierge” – an add on to CMS when dealing with whistleblowing
  • Could be additional data entry screen, pop up, etc., that would help with best practices
  • Provide important disclaimers, guiding phrases for communicating with the whistleblower, access limitation of the data in the CMS

Alex Lyte, Sunwater Institute – Stakeholder Meeting Prep

  • Updates on platform since last year: can see who is lobbying on a bill, background on the organization; dashboard for issue areas w/r/t upcoming votes; alerts for amendments on bills; custom analytics
  • Tells you about the org: bills they lobby on , member votes, and AI drafted memo briefing. Backgrounder on orgs that a member/staff meets with

Terrence Bennett, Dreamfactory – Access to Info

  • It writing about ACMRA / Rule 2 clerk reports due to Congress
  • Dashboard for government reports for when new reports land; when info changes across bills
  • Can build dashboards that a member specific; committee specific

Tara Buchmore, Sen. Gillibrand; Bethan Saunders, Mazie Hirono – 

  • BillsBillsBills
  • Similar legislation was introduced two congresses ago
  • An AI system trained on existing legislative catalog. Can query to find legislation that is conceptually similar. Useful either for topically similar or for useful format
  • Building a vector database from Congress.gov
  • Feedback loop; user training

Ashley Nagel AI Fellow,. Schatz – Bill Bot (shows how amendments change bill, can write one pagers)

  • Public GPT App
  • It’s live on chatgpt
  • Can write a 1 pager for the bill
  • Can use Colin Raby’s “Congress.gov Expert” App tied into Congress.gov’s API to pull the bill
  • BillBot is also useful to applying a series of amendments to my bill – so you can see how each amendment can impact the bill
  • (This mirrors the comparative print project)
  • Show how the bill affects the US code

Kaylee Meier, GW University – Task Flow

  • First year CS Major
  • Streamlining task delegation and calendar management
  • (I didn’t follow this one)

Press Clips Generator – Colin Raby, Rep. Krishnamoorthi

  • Finds way to eliminate the monotonous work
  • Press clips – summary of important news re: a member, etc., consolidated into one document
  • Current process: copy and paste every article headline, first paragraph, summary, date, etc.; build out the sections, format, etc. – repeat 50 times
  • You provide the URLs, the app scrapes the info off the website and pre-chain AI to get rid of extraneous info and give you what you want for daily press clips
  • rabyc@ymail.com
  • 202-400-7267

Medha Gupta, Adobe – Casefile.AI

  • Streamlining communications between hill staff and constituents
  • Constituent visits casefile.ai. Can prompt chatbot to answer questions. With additional questions is redirected to the right level of gov’t
  • Geolocation to ID who represents the constituents

Shaun Brown, House Digital Service (CAO) – LegiDex

  • Congressional staff directory
  • HDS procures data to help keep it up date – House payroll, telephone directory, badges, active directory; aggregate against 3rd parties for issues; foresee legidex as a primary source of data for all 
  • Roles based on titles
  • Use case: bulk email staff
  • 2-3 weeks away from a pilot
  • Invite staff to join the pilot, get ready for general house release

Isabella Hochschild, Dartmouth College – Retrieval-Augmented Legislation

  • Senior at Dartmouth
  • Retrieval-Augmented Legislation – AI powered bill analysis tool
  • Transform how Congress interacts with legislation
  • Real time, natural language dialog with any bill.
  • Side by side with current legislation

Ashley Julian, AEJ Group – Diversifying Digital Channels with Constituents

  • Founder and CEO of AEJ Group
  • How congress communications with constituents via digital
  • Display digital ads is increasing
  • Another tool to communicate with constituents

Nick Harty UPENN & Aum Dhruv (Princeton) – dealmaker

  • Upload bill, summary highlights key provisions
  • Predicts how members of Congress are likely to vote – budget reports, opinion polls, etc.
  • Forecast outcome with 90% accuracy
  • Identifies divisive parts of bills and the key dealmakers
  • Breaks down the micro issues and what changes would help gain or lose votes
  • Offers suggestions for revisions so the legislation is more likely to succeed

Arjun Karanam, Apple – Policy Dreamer

  • Had competed in app challenge in 2015
  • Work he did during his masters thesis at stanford
  • Try to give a couple of options to react against; brainstorm
  • Generate axes of uncertainty
  • arjunkaranam10@gmail.com
  • Have interesting results from chatting with policymakers
  • Want to build a user friendly interface

Jason Lemons, Prolegis – AI Curated Bill Summaries with Complete Context

  • Grant from AWS to provide bill summaries to help accelerate the capacity to staff
  • Built out RAG
  • Want to make the foundation model available for experimentation

Melissa Darden – InaugTrackr

  • TourTrackr – used by 135 offices
  • Digitizes inauguration ticket management
  • Help every office efficiently take in and allocate tickets
  • Email wraps before and afterward
  • melissa@tourtrackr.com

Kalpana Ahuja, House Web Services – Website 508 Accessibility

  • 508 Accessibility Effort

Ryan Parker, PLEJ LC

  • Congress.wiki
  • Type in your address and you get an executive summary of your senators, representatives, other state officials
  • ryanparker@congress.wiki
  • Also can send postcards to elected officials

Alex Gomez, CAO, HIR, Identity Governance & Administration – Mobile Device MFA

  • Phishing resistant authentication way for staffer to work through their House-managed device to be more secure and have fewer challenges for ease and usability
  • Can link the phone to access the resources

Sajal Shukla, U Chicago – Constituent Roundup

  • Transcribe communications; use AI to summarize; and then sum it up; discuss issues by frequency

Dean Alderucci, House Science, Space, and Tech Committee

  • House could use several dozen very different AI products – how do we prepare the House to take advantage of these technologies?
  • Solution: create an AI factory (an AI platform)
  • Have common components – let people assemble the components
  • Let non-experts create and modify AI products
  • His time ends at the end of the year
  • At research center at Carnegie Mellon
  • Let’s build them all

Lighting Round Pitch Vote Results

Ernestine Dawson, Leader Jeffries Office

Breakout groups (6):

  • AI – Steve Dwyer
  • Legislative Data – Yuri, Geneva, Markos
  • Constituent Services – Sally, Mciahel, and Stephanie (upstairs)
  • Modern Committees – Derek, Marian, and Drew (back of atrium)
  • Cybersecurity – Addy, Mora, and Kristen (north conference room)
  • Communications – heather, ananda, chloe

Presentation Read Outs

AI group – #1

  • Pre-loaded ontologies and taxonomies
  • Problems: Congress LLM;
  • AI for Oversight; for constituent Comms
  • All the various videos
  • AI & constituent comms
  • AI helps scale the ability to manage constituent comms – automate response

AI group #2

  • AI & Casework
  • How to make it human centered with a better interaction
  • Public awareness of services in an office
  • Simultaneous translation
  • How can the urgent case get faster handling

Constituent Services

  • Constituents need a one-stop shop to understand and access services provided by member offices, and they often don’t know who their member is. 
  • constituents.gov

Modern Committees

  • Focus: increasing public engagement in committee hearings
  • Issue: ability to create an in person and virtual environment
  • Lack of standardization
  • Committee structure is tv-oriented
  • Public-private partnership/grant for c-span – youtube like platform that supports public engagement
  • Leverage expert/networks. In other countries they have offices whose main responsibilities are to develop and share questions to expert networks who can answer the questions; and those folks are trained in how to talk to Congress. 
  • Many committees, very independent. Open source platforming to help committees standardize. Open source spec for interoperability
  • Standardize ticketing for constituent comms

If it were up to me:

  • Schedule meetings more than a week in advance
  • Reduce the number of meetings
  • Connect with expert networks
  • Work with civil society to do calls for questions + information
  • Making the hearings less freaking boring

Cybersecurity

  • Congress is high level threat
  • Dual role: serve the people and protect the people
  • And AI

Communications

  • Volume/ capacity
  • CRMS are now better at auto-batching and suggesting responses to constituent email
  • Use sentiment analysis
  • Aggregate data on constituent comms across the House
  • Possibly a survey tool could be useful to gather opinions

Legislative Data

  • Sign on letters -> not an equivalent for what’s sent to agencies, entities, etc., which are a huge part of their work. Do have Quill. Having a central repository would be useful (too much asking please sign on to my letter). 
  • Committees -> committee data is inconsistent, timing varies, availability varies.  This isn’t a data or tech based solution, but at the congressional rules + procedural level.
  • Constituent data -> Have a form in advance about willingness to hand over the data. The constituent decides – they own their PII.

Legislative Data

  • Data is not always useful for large scale processing. Missing data points on measuring the impact of legislation on the country. So…. develop standards for tagging and coding data. Agile development to make data available spooner. Establish a state of records to determine whether it is preliminary, in progress, or final.

Previous hackathons:

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