Orlando Devs Hack the Florida Legislature at the Tabs on Tallahassee Hackathon

On Saturday January 16, 2016 Code for Orlando joined Orlando Sentinel to host the Tabs on Tallahassee Hackathon at Canvs coworking space in downtown Orlando.

After 6 months of development, the Orlando Sentinal unveiled a new API for the FL Legislature. The API, which returns data about the Florida House and Senate, includes: legislator voting history, bill lists by location affected, bill lists by topic, bill lists by search query, bill progress and legislator biographies. The API also ties legislators to their relevant geographic areas. The Tabs on Tallahassee Hackathon opened this API up to local developers, designers and tech-savvy citizens to put it to the test and see what kinds of civic tools could be built with it.

The hackathon began with breakfast, which fueled participants for ideation time, pitches, and team formation. Teams worked from 9am to 5pm to plan and build their ideas before demoing to a panel of judges from the Orlando tech community.

The two engineers who built the API were on location, quick to respond to developer requests to add endpoints and adjust rate limiting. It was the first time the API had ever been consumed and it proved itself useful and reliable to some of Orlando's top tech talent. Check out the API docs.

In the end over 50 attendees formed 9 teams that delivered 9 open-source projects using the new Tabs on Tallahassee API.

Some of the projects that were built

• Voting Data on Florida Bills
• Tabs on Tallahassee Android app
• Florida Legislator Matching API
• #FLVote
• More coming soon...

Further Reading

• Local Hackathon Aimed at Government Transparency Prepares Voters for Election Season
• Knight Foundation Funds Innovation, Improves Communities
• Tabs on Tallahassee: Tracking the Florida Legislature in real-time (An Orlando Sentinel project)

Wanna get Involved?

• Join the Code for Orlando Meetup Group