Washington DC

I attended Open Data Day DC today. It was held at the World Bank in Northwest DC. I hacked away on a “bill pedigree” project.

I worked with some people from the Cato Institute and the Sunlight Foundation. The project took federal bills from all stages of the legislative process, breaks then down into paragraphs and analyzes the similarities of text between bills. So, for example, this would let us see exactly what interests are in play in an omnibus bill or compare which congressmen submitted identical text to different bills.

I had a lot of fun hacking with the other participants. We didn’t finish any of the parts of the project that we were working on, but did make a lot of progress.

I hope I’ll be able to participate again next year.