Legal Software: Hack4Congress Legislative Hackathon and Conference: Results, storify, links, and resources

duminică, 1 februarie 2015

Hack4Congress Legislative Hackathon and Conference: Results, storify, links, and resources

#Hack4Congress: A “Not-Just-for-Technologists” Event to Fix Congress with the OpenGov Foundation — a legislative hackathon — was held January 30-February 1, 2015, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

The event’s Website is available at: http://ift.tt/18hiKUf

The winners of the event were:

Best project overall, and winner of Challenge 4: “Close the Representation and Trust Gaps”: Congress Connect , by Team HillHack

Winner of Challenge 1: “Law Making Process”: eDearColleague , by Team The Dear Colleagues

Winner of Challenge 2: “Facilitating Cross-Partisan Dialogue”: DICO , by Team DICO (code)

Winner of Challenge 3: “Modernizing Congressional Participation”:OpenHearing , by Team Awesome (demo)

Winner of Challenge 5: “Reforming Campaign Finance”: Bill Exploder , by Team Consensus

All projects worked on at the event, and all the project teams, are described at: http://ift.tt/1LCm1wE

Sponsors of the event included Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, the OpenGov Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation, Congressional Management Foundation, Microsoft New England, Represent.Us, CODE2040, POPVOX, Capitol Bells, and Generation Citizen.

The hackpad for the event, which includes the program, is at: http://ift.tt/1K1Xzms

Challenges and projects intended to be worked on at the event are listed at: http://ift.tt/1K1Xzmu

Data sets, APIs, and examples of apps to be used at the event are listed at: http://ift.tt/1LCm1wL

One Twitter hashtag for the event appears to be #Hack4Congress

Click here for storify of images and Twitter tweets from the event.

The Boston Herald has published an article about the event: Jordan Graham, Harvard hacks for Congress: Kennedy school devises ways to bring lawmakers together .

Here is a description, from the event’s Website:

[…] Congress needs “fixes”—but where will these new tools and solutions come from? By bringing together political scientists, technologists, designers, lawyers, organizational psychologists, and lawmakers, #Hack4Congress will help foster new digital tools, policy innovations, and other technology innovations to address the growing dysfunction in Congress.

Help fix Congress! Join political scientists and policy experts, technologists, architects, and designers at #Hack4Congress at Harvard Kennedy School of Government to help identify ideas and innovations to overcome the dysfunction gripping much of Congress. “Hacking” is not just for technologists. “Hacks” include innovations in policy, architecture, organizational process, art and design, and educational materials, as well as new software and technologies.

Solutions presented at the end of the hackathon will be evaluated by a panel of judges. After a second hackathon hosted by The OpenGov Foundation on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. in spring 2015, the winning teams will have an opportunity to present their projects to lawmakers and other high-level officials inside Congress. Move our democracy forward.[…]

Click here for the registration page.

For more details, please see the event’s Website.

HT @FoundOpenGov and @hrgilman