This is your irregular update on tools, projects, and events concerning Legislative branch data and modernization. 

The Congressional Data Task Force met on June 11 for a series of presentations, demos, and public questions. Among the highlights: the Task Force unveiled a legislative branch data map; CRS demoed its text analysis program; the Secretary of the Senate announced app tracking vote alerts; and the CAO presented four projects that just received Modernization Initiative Funding. We at AGI showcased our efforts to track congressionally mandated reports. Read more here.

The House Administration Committee recently held two hearings: one on CRS & the future of AI-enabled policy analysis and the other on modernizing public access to legislative data. We wrote a history of CRS’s evolution, summarized the CRS hearing focused on its efforts to use AI, and analyzed the landscape of legislative branch data availability following the legislative data modernization hearing. Our written testimonies focused on reimagining CRS in the AI era and strengthening the Congressional Data Task Force.

We are continuing our makerspace blog post series, which focuses on people building congressional technology tools. Our most recent article covers Dave Zvenyach’s efforts on our behalf to use technology to verify congressionally mandated reports. Don’t miss our recaps of MyCapitol.ai, Capitol Labs, and Congress Press. If you are building a legislative-centric tool, we want to talk to you. Email congressionaldata@americalabs.org.

How are parliaments around the world using AI? I recently drew upon recent convenings that we co-hosted to discuss AI, Parliamentary Modernization, and the Legislative Plumbing of Democracy. 

The House Administration Committee published the most recent round of Modernization Reports in late June. They contain updates from support offices on various tech projects. They include updates on U.S. Legislative Markup, the Comparative Print Suite, Committee Votes and Tools, and Unique IDs for reports filed by registered lobbyists. We anticipate summarizing these reports in the First Branch Forecast newsletter and archiving that summary on the Congressional Data Coalition blog. 

The Modernization Subcommittee announced yesterday a series of exciting updates, including the launch of the House AI Innovators Pipeline to empower House staff to build custom applications for congressional operations; the securing of funds for House Rules digital infrastructure modernization— PRISM, to improve amendment intake, document generation, and statutory reporting; and the request for funds to develop “My Intelligent Assistant,” a customizable AI agent connected to House data sources to assist staff with their work. 

Our friends at Bussola Tech are continuing to host a series of online conversations about parliamentary digitization. Upcoming events include: Cybersecurity in the AI era and what makes digital transformation succeed in parliaments. A recent event of interest concerns the accuracy of speech-to-text technologies. Their news page is here.

Mark your calendars. 

The Congress.gov public forum is set for Sept. 24, 1-3 p.m. ET. The hybrid event, hosted by the Library of Congress, offers congressional and public stakeholders an opportunity to share suggestions for additional features for Congress.gov with the Congress.gov team and learn about changes to that service. It’s not yet possible to RSVP, but information is available here. We will likely host a happy hour afterward; details are TBD.

The Congressional Data Task Force is anticipated to hold its third quarterly meeting in September, but a date has not yet been announced on September 10 from 2-4 p.m. The fourth quarter meeting is scheduled for December 3. 

A Congressional Hackathon is also no longer anticipated for September, but a date has not been announced.

Information about those events will be published on the Task Force’s Innovation Hub webpage and the Congressional Data Coalition website.

If you have a project or announcement to share, or just want to talk about Congressional data, please let us know! Email us at congressionaldata@americalabs.org.