Civic Tech DC brings together volunteers putting technology to work in service of civic and social issues in the Washington, DC community.

Civic Tech DC

Build open-source tools to unlock federal regulatory comment data with AI, data science, and policy expertise.

🥐 Food, drinks, and starter kits provided.

Please reach out to hack2025@civictechdc.org if you are interested in sponsoring an event location!

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.

Join us for a hands-on, collaborative hackathon focused on improving public access to regulatory comment data from 

. You'll team up with technologists and policy experts to build open-source tools that make this data easier to analyze, explore, and reuse.

No prior experience with federal data required—just experience working around datasets and a laptop. 

Every year, thousands of public comments are submitted in response to proposed federal rules—but they're locked away in PDFs, spreadsheets, and inconsistent formats. Our goal is to fix that.

You'll work with a 2.3TB+ dataset made accessible by 

Professor Ben Coleman’s team at Moravian

. This is a rare opportunity to apply your skills to a real civic data infrastructure challenge.

This non-competitive event will focus on building reusable tools and answering key questions like:

We're actively seeking problem statements from policy experts to explore during the hackathon. If you have an idea, please submit it through this 

 (due July 23); we'll review submissions and select key problems for participants to tackle. 

One confirmed track: analysis of the recent 

recent CMS RFI concerning patient-centered health technology

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:

! just bring your curiosity, ideas, and laptop. We'll provide starter kits, roaming mentors, 

"Librarian at Lektriever in Washingtoniana Division", from the DC Public Library Archive

Civic Hack DC 2025 – Making Public Comments Count