A contest to discover who could find the best use for congressional data has awarded its two highest prizes to high school students, the Library of Congress announced June 20.

“I was really impressed with the variety, quality and creativity of submissions we received — and that was before I knew the winning projects were made by high school students,” said Kate Zwaard, director for digital strategy at the Library of Congress.

“I am thrilled this competition connected so many youth with the data we make available on Congress.gov and, by extension, the legislative process.”

Alan Gomez-Tagle, a sophomore at Newton North High School in Massachusetts, and Carter Nielsen, a junior at the same school, created the winning project: “U.S. Treaties Explorer,” which presents the United States’ treaties and agreements with other countries in an interactive format.

“The students managed to use open-source tools to make something better than most professional news organizations can make and, for that, they deserve to win,” said Andy Boyle, a writer, web developer and director of platform architecture at Axios and judge for the Congressional Data Challenge.

“The data visualization communicates a great deal of information in a user-friendly format.”

Gomez-Tagle and Nielsen were awarded $5,000 by the Library of Congress.

The next-highest prize, a $1,000 cash award for best high school project, was given to a mobile app called “Dealmaker,” developed by Daniel Vebman, a junior at Friends Seminary School in New York City.

The app shows users the level of legislative collaboration in Congress with three different visualizations of relationships between members of Congress: partisanship, geography and between individuals.

“The geographic focus and the mobile accessibility of the application provide a better understanding of partisanship to people,” said Paul Ford, a co-founder of Postlight and judge for the Congressional Data Challenge.

“The visualizations were solid and based on real data.”

All submissions were based on legislative data sets available on Congress.gov, which tracks legislative activities for each Congress.

Jessie Bur covers federal IT and management.

Share:
In Other News
Load More