We recently met a rising senior at Washington & Lee University named Sam Cook. As a Computer Science and Politics major, he observed the delicate dance between platforms and spreadsheets used by the congressional office in which he was interning to manage its scheduling as a potential project. He started on building a platform that could pull information from multiple sources into one scheduling dashboard as an independent study project last semester at W&L and returned to DC this summer to complete the work.

His HillDesk platform features a combination of automation and user review we think will save member offices significant time with necessary reassurance that information won’t be missed or garbled. It finds and flags emails containing meeting requests and event invitations through natural language processing and extracts the calendaring outputs side by side with the email, allowing users to double-check at the moment of processing. Cook has provided context based on a typical Hill office for the extraction system to improve its accuracy. The dashboard also pulls in the House floor schedule via DomeWatch.

In addition to being a promising tool to save congressional schedulers’ time and sanity, we’re intrigued by this project because it’s the first we’ve come across testing out the House Chief Administrative Officer’s unsolicited tech pitch form, which was announced at this spring’s Congressional Data Task Force meeting to provide an on-ramp for independent developers. If approved, it would be a great example of someone taking their experience from a congressional office and applying their know-how to make an incremental but meaningful improvement. That’s a sign of the kind of culture we’ve been championing in congressional modernization for some time. It’s even cooler that it’s coming from a college student who touched the institution for a short time but feels the motivation to make it better.

Reach out to Sam about the project at Samuel at hilldesk dot app.