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.