Last night, Seamus and I were honored to be among the crowd celebrating the selected winners of the 2015 Congressional App Challenge (CAC) at the inaugural #HouseofCode event. Aimed at encouraging U.S. high school students to learn how to code, the CAC achieved overwhelming success this year with 493 original applications from 32 states.
The selected winners demonstrating their ideas included Charechat, a messaging app that allows you to play games with friends, by Ari Sokolov in Arizona’s sixth district and Crunchtime, a location-based app that crowdsources real-time wait times for venues, by Brad Cooley in Colorado’s fourth district. In between demonstrations, we heard from House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, 2016 CAC Co-Chairs Rep. Mimi Waters and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, and 2015 Co-Chair Rep. Anna Eshoo about the importance of encouraging good ideas and innovation.
This event showcases how the institution is embracing technology and how future leaders will push new solutions to age-old problems. The CAC is already preparing to launch the next round which will be July 18, 2016 through November 2, 2016. For more information, check out http://www.congressionalappchallenge.us/
Meag Doherty is the Operations Associate at The OpenGov Foundation.
The post Congressional App Challenge Bolsters a Vision of the Institution’s Future appeared first on The OpenGov Foundation.