Congress routinely requires federal agencies to report back on their activities, but the legislative branch struggles with tracking and sharing those reports. After a decade long effort, in late 2022 Congress enacted the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act. This law requires many agencies to provide a duplicate copy of the reports they submit to Congress to the Government Publishing Office, which maintains a central repository and makes the reports available to legislators and the public.

The legislation is a significant accomplishment for government transparency as the public would no longer need to file a FOIA request for these documents. It also is a significant accomplish for government accountability and efficiency, as all congressional offices would be able to obtain agency reports to Congress. In the past, the reports might easily be lost or not available to all.

Unfortunately, execution of the law faces significant technical challenges.

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.

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.

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.

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.