Civic Hack DC 2025 – Making Public Comments Count
Build open-source tools to unlock federal regulatory comment data with AI, data science, and policy expertise.
📅 Saturday, July 26
🕙 10:00 AM – 6:30 PM
📍 Metro-accessible venue in DC (TBD)
🥐 Food, drinks, and starter kits provided.
Please reach out to hack2025@civictechdc.org if you are interested in sponsoring an event location!
More info on our Website
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.
🚀 About the Event
Join us for a hands-on, collaborative hackathon focused on improving public access to regulatory comment data from Regulations.gov. 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.
Full List of Event Partners
🧠 Why It Matters
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, updated every 4 hours and hosted on AWS. This is a rare opportunity to apply your skills to a real civic data infrastructure challenge.
🔍 What We’ll Build Together
This non-competitive event will focus on building reusable tools and answering key questions like:
Who's commenting? (Individuals, nonprofits, corporations)
What are the major themes or sentiments?
Are there coordinated efforts or mass submissions?
Which comments shaped final policy outcomes?
🙋♀️ Who Should Attend
Technologists: Data engineers, data scientists, AI/ML developers, and coders of moderate skill or experience.
Policy Experts: Government, nonprofit, or academic professionals who understand the rulemaking process
Curious Collaborators: Students, newcomers, and anyone excited to learn
📬 Submit a Problem Statement
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 (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.
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?
📆 Schedule (Subject to Change)
9:30 AM – Registration & Breakfast
10:00 AM – Welcome + Data Tour w/ Prof. Coleman
10:30 AM – Problem Overview & Team Formation
11:00 AM – Hacking Begins
1:00 PM – Lunch
5:45 PM – Final Presentations
6:30 PM – Wrap-up & Networking
🧩 Want to Support the Event?
We’re seeking:
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.
Event image: "Librarian at Lektriever in Washingtoniana Division", from the DC Public Library Archive