Civic Hack DC 2025 – NLP for Democracy: Mining Public Comments for Policy Insights
Save the date! Saturday, July 26, 10 AM – 6:30 PM (venue TBD, metro-accessible), food and drink provided.
Please reach out to hack2025@civictechdc.org if you are interested in sponsoring an event location!
Join Civic Tech DC and partners for Civic Hack DC 2025:
A collaborative, hands-on hackathon dedicated to using AI, data science, and data engineering techniques to unlock public-comment data and illuminate how the public influences federal policies.
Why this matters:
Each time a federal agency proposes new rules or seeks public input via regulations.gov, thousands of comments pour in from individuals, advocacy groups, corporations, and more. Yet the data is notoriously difficult to access, analyze, and utilize effectively.
To bridge this gap, Professor Ben Coleman and his students at Moravian University developed a robust open-source data pipeline. Powered by donated API keys, their tool continuously downloads and publishes public comments across agencies to S3 on AWS through it's Open Data Platform, making the comments freely available for exploration and analysis.
Submit Your Problem Statements:
We're actively seeking problem statements from policy experts to explore during the hackathon. If you have an idea, please submit it through this form; we'll review submissions and select key problems for participants to tackle. One of our primary problem statements will focus on the recent CMS RFI concerning patient-centered health technology.
What we'll build together:
In this collaborative, non-competitive event, participants will develop open-source tools designed for reuse with any public comment dataset, past or future, exploring questions such as:
Who's commenting? (Individuals, nonprofits, corporations)
What are the major themes, sentiments, and sector-specific concerns?
Can we detect copy-paste campaigns or coordinated submissions?
What are organizations' historical commenting trends and motivations?
Which public comments directly influenced the final regulatory outcomes?
We're Looking For:
Partnerships: Organizations interested in co-hosting, promoting, and helping us facilitate the event.
Subject Matter Experts: Individuals with expertise willing to serve on our problem review board and provide insights on submitted problem statements.
Sponsorships: Financial support, venue donations, food and beverage provision, or computing infrastructure; including cloud credits, AI resources, and infrastructure support.
Please reach out to hack2025@civictechdc.org
No prior experience is required! just bring your curiosity, ideas, and laptop. We'll provide starter kits, roaming mentors, food, and drinks.
Hackathon Partners: