Saturday, October 3, 2026
10:00 AM – 6:00 PM EDT
Civic Hack DC 2026 Part 2: From Prototype to Production
About this event
A full-day civic hackathon at George Washington University building production-grade open source tools on federal regulatory comment data, including AI-driven comment search, summarisation and theme analysis.
Civic Tech DC runs the second part of its 2026 civic hackathon, and the brief is deliberately harder than a weekend prototype: build tools good enough to actually run.
The work extends SpicyRegs, the project that came out of Civic Hack DC 2025, which operates on federal regulatory comment data. Concrete targets include search and summarisation across large comment corpora, and theme and trend analysis, all of which are squarely language model problems given the volume and repetitiveness of public comment filings.
Projects are judged on usefulness, feasibility, accessibility, trust and documentation, which is a notably different rubric from a typical hackathon and reflects the production framing.
Doors at 9:30 for a 10:00 start, running to 6:00. Free to attend, with food, drinks and starter kits provided. Hosted at George Washington University in Foggy Bottom; the specific building had not been announced at the time of listing, so check the registration page closer to the date.
Organized by
A volunteer Washington DC civic technology community running weekly project nights and an annual civic hackathon, building open source tools on public data including federal regulatory comment corpora.