At a Glance
📅 Date: Saturday, October 3
🕙 Time: (Doors open 9:30AM) 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
📍 Location: George Washington University
🥐 Provided: Food, drinks, and starter kits
Interested in sponsoring, advising, judging, or partnering?Email hack2025@civictechdc.org
From Prototype to Production
Civic Hack DC is back.
At Civic Hack DC 2025, technologists, policy experts, designers, data practitioners, and civic-minded volunteers explored what could be built with federal regulatory comment data.
Now we’re taking the next step: from prototype to production.
Part 2 will build on SpicyRegs and the original Civic Hack DC 2025 problem statements to create production-level open-source MVP tools for making public comments easier to search, analyze, understand, and act on.
This time, we’re focused on tools that can continue beyond demo day.
What Makes Part 2 Different
Part 1 was about exploring what is possible.
Part 2 is about building what can actually be used.
We are organizing teams around real work groups, judges, advisors, and product-owner partners who can help define needs, validate assumptions, and guide teams toward practical tools.
Together, teams will ask:
Who is this tool for?
What workflow does it support?
What would make it trustworthy enough to use?
What is the smallest useful version we can ship?
What should continue after the hackathon?
Judging and feedback will focus on usefulness, feasibility, accessibility, trust, documentation, and potential for real-world impact.
What We’ll Build
Participants may work on tools for:
public comment search and summarization;
theme, trend, and pattern detection across large dockets;
dashboards for policy analysts, advocates, journalists, researchers, and public servants;
data pipelines, APIs, and regulatory data infrastructure;
AI-assisted workflows designed with transparency, trust, and human review in mind;
improvements to the SpicyRegs technical foundation.
The goal is not just to make a clever demo.
The goal is to create ope
Agencies are adopting AI faster than they can show it is ready for the mission. Credo AI helps government agencies and Fortune 500 companies govern AI and manage its risk, so the systems they deploy are trustworthy, secure and under control. Join Credo AI at STATION DC for an evening reception and a panel with Navrina Singh, Founder and CEO of Credo AI, and a special guest on what it takes to deliver mission-ready AI across government. 5:30 PM Doors open, drinks and light bites 6:15 PM Panel with Navrina Singh, Founder and CEO of Credo AI, and a special guest 7:30 PM Event concludes This room is built for: Agency AI, data and acquisition leaders AI and AI assurance practitioners Founders and investors building AI for government Registration requires approval. Drinks and light bites provided.
Data Viz DC Monthly Meetup: Agenda: 5:30 - Doors 5:30 - 6:15: Food & Socializing 6:15 - 6:30: Introductions 6:30 - 8:00: Data by Hand: An Interactive Introduction to Data Physicalization If you're interested in the intersection of Data Science, Visual Design, UI/UX, Art, Psychology, and Business Intelligence, this event is for you! --- Data by Hand: An Interactive Introduction to Data Physicalization Jonathan Schwabish, PhD Data physicalization is the act of creating data visualizations in physical space—with twine, Post-it notes, stickers, foam board, and even food. Many physicalization projects showcased in books and papers are built for exhibition, where the viewer has little influence over the visualization itself. This session takes a different approach: collaborative, community-driven, and affordable enough to run in any classroom or office. We’ll begin with a short lecture situating data physicalization within the broader landscape of data visualization and establishing the shared vocabulary—data types, encodings, chart families—needed for the work that follows. The remainder of the session is hands-on. Working in small groups, participants will use and build physical charts from everyday materials, then step back to discuss what the act of encoding by hand makes visible: the design choices, the trade-offs, and the questions that a screen tends to hide. Bio Dr. Jonathan Schwabish is an economist, author, and educator whose work focuses on improving how researchers, scientists, analysts, and policymakers communicate data and evidence. Through his writing, teaching, and public engagement, he works to make complex research more accessible to broader audiences and more useful for decisionmaking. He is the author of four books on data visualization and research communication—Better Presentations, Elevate the Debate, Better Data Visualizations, and Data Visualization in Excel—which provide practical guidance for presenting data and communicating research clearl