On Friday, we joined the second Congressional Hackathon in the U.S. Capitol. It has been four years since the first, and the visible growth in the movement for creating a better Congress with better tech was incredible.
Back in December 2011, Congressman Darrell Issa — who co-founded The OpenGov Foundation with me — announced to a small crowd that we were furiously and sleeplessly creating something called Madison for crowdsourcing legislation. Now, we are on Madison v1.8, the House is officially open-source friendly, and hundreds of people are showing up for Congressional data events.
Bottom line: last Friday was a stunning reinforcement of our belief that we should be bringing that energy of the open government community to bear on the challenges in government every single day.
Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer and Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy kicked off the proceedings with rousing remarks encouraging participants to make Congress more efficient, effective, transparent and responsive. Ultimately, the goal is to rebuild Americans’ trust in their government. We were honored that both leaders cited The OpenGov Foundation and #Hack4Congress as crucial contributors towards a 21st Century Congress.
As the hackathon got down to business, I joined Rep. Mark Takano’s Deputy Chief of Staff Yuri Beckelman to lead a breakout group focused on legislative data. One team in the legislative data group started tackling the challenge of tracking promises made by politicians, while another examined the best data points that could identify collaboration between different members of Congress. Quorum brought their dev team to work on a way for draft legislation to be made available in better data formats. Another team, that included members from the Office of the House Clerk, the Library of Congress and the Government Publishing Office, looked at understanding which members of Congress were a member of particular committees or subcommittees at a particular point in time.
A terrific group of House Members came through our breakout to learn more about the problems on which teams were working, and to engage with participants on their proposed solutions. In the Legislative Data breakout, we visited with Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-OR, Rep. Seth Moulton, D-MA, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-CA, and Rep. Bill Foster, D-WI. Our groups took notes in a shared hackpad and presented their ideas to the full group at the end of the day.
After concluding the hacking, we joined our friends from Demand Progress, the R Street Institute and the Congressional Data Coalition in hosting an unofficial happy hour at Google’s DC headquarters for the event. Hundreds joined the celebration, from those who hacked throughout the day to staffers and technologists who support more open, tech-powered governance on Capitol Hill.
As I headed home Friday night, I was fired up to continue our mission to use technology to improve how citizens and government can work together. Thank you to everyone who participated and who made it possible. I can’t wait for the third Congressional Hackathon. Given what we saw last week, we’re going to have to get a bigger room!
Check out this recap video put together by Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s office:
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