Hackathon Targets Congressional 'Dysfunction'

UPDATED: February 3, 2015, at 5:55 a.m.

Entrepreneurs, political scientists, lawyers, and students from Harvard and around the United States came together this weekend for the Kennedy School of Government’s #Hack4Congress, a “not-just-for-technologists” event that aimed to brainstorm solutions to what an organizer called congressional "dysfunction."

Tables are brought out at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum for #Hack4Congress. The hackathon ran from Friday, Jan. 30 to Sunday, Feb. 1. By Y. Kit Wu

The hackathon, which drew about 145 attendees, was organized by the Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation in collaboration with the OpenGov Foundation.

“[We] put together this hackathon based on the realization that a lot of the innovation and technology organizations today are...looking for ways to replace, [not improve], government,” said Maggie L. McKinley, one of the event’s organizers and a lecturer at the Law School. “We were hopeful that this event could remedy...not only the dysfunction in Congress but also the absence of innovative solutions.”

At a kick-off panel on Friday afternoon, faculty and former public officials highlighted potential issues for attendees to explore, such as redistricting, lack of primary voter turnout, and the decrease in the number of candidates running for public office.

On Saturday, attendees were then divided into 13 teams that tackled topics raised during the introductory panel, as well as problems submitted beforehand by members of Congress and staffers.

The solutions brainstormed and presented over the weekend drew largely from data science and the political experience of attendees.

Tufts undergraduate Alice R. Lee said that her team looked at how to filter and analyze the massive quantity of emails received by congressional offices, a problem her teammates had encountered on Capitol Hill. Her team manually tagged some of the 250,000 emails released by Jeb Bush earlier this year from his time as governor of Florida and fed them to a prototype machine learning and language processing algorithm that they demoed at the event.

A team that included three Kennedy School students was ultimately judged the overall winner of the hackathon for their demo of a platform that would allow constituents to directly request meetings with congressional representatives, as well as view educational videos to prepare for those meetings. They will present their idea to a currently undetermined group of members of Congress and will be joined by the winners of the second #Hack4Congress event in D.C. this spring, also organized by the OpenGov Foundation.

Seamus B. Kraft, executive director and co-founder of the OpenGov Foundation and a former Congressional staffer, said that although he did not necessarily expect “silver-bullet solutions” from this event or the ones to follow, these hackathons would start the process needed to publicize and ultimately solve Congress’s problems.

“You surface problems to communities who can solve them, who have no idea that these problems exist in the first place, but who are mad as heck with Congress and their government and don’t want to take it anymore,” he said. “We can take that energy and channel it into building a better government, line by line, code by code, zero by one.”

—Staff writer Luca F. Schroeder can be reached at schroeder@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @lucaschroeder.