Events

A hackathon is a collaborative, time-limited event where participants come together to build innovative solutions—often using technology—to address a specific challenge.

This hackathon brings together subject matter experts from government, nonprofits, and academia with experienced data engineers and data scientists to improve public access and understanding of stakeholder comments informing the federal rulemaking process.

We seek individuals skilled in handling large datasets or proficient in data science and analysis, as well as those knowledgeable about the federal rulemaking process. Technical participants will build reusable tools, while policy experts will guide problem definition and ensure solutions meet real-world needs.

Not sure if this is right for you? Have questions about the format or your potential contribution? Email us at hack2025@civictechdc.org – we're happy to discuss how your expertise can contribute.

For the past 50 years, when the federal government has proposed a rule through Regulations.gov, it has solicited public comment from stakeholders as part of the rulemaking process. Depending on the scope of the rule, the government may receive thousands of comments from individuals, advocates, and corporate interests. Agencies are required to meaningfully consider and respond to these comments before finalizing the rule.

However, while the data is technically public, it's not practically usable. Comments are often locked away in PDFs, messy spreadsheets, and other formats that are difficult for data scientists and engineers to work with at scale. This creates a major barrier not just to public transparency, but to effective, data-driven policy analysis.

To bridge this gap, Professor Ben Coleman and his students at Moravian University have developed a robust open-source data pipeline. Powered by donated API keys, their tool continuously downloads and publishes public comments across all federal agencies to S3 bucket on AWS through its Open Data Platform, making comments easily accessible to the public for exploration and analysis. The dataset includes over 2.3 TB of data (640 GB of text) and is updated every 4 hours.

During this hackathon, we'll tackle real challenges in this data including multi-format inputs (JSON, PDFs, images, spreadsheets), low-quality OCR conversions, and complex metadata structures. The tools we build will be designed to work with any regulatory data—past, present, or future—creating lasting infrastructure for civic engagement. Professor Coleman will kick off the event with a comprehensive data tour, and we'll provide starter kits to help teams quickly begin building impactful solutions.