Joshua Tauberer,  Ph.D.

I am a software developer and civic technologist living in Washington, DC best known for creating GovTrack.us, the widely used educational website about the U.S. Congress. I am currently the Head of Product Development at LARSA and previously held numerous consulting and co-founder roles related to information technology innovation in government.

Work

Head of Product Development LARSA, Inc.

Multinational construction companies rely on desktop software developed by LARSA, Inc. to design billion-dollar bridges and other complex structures, from overpasses in the District of Columbia to world-renowned cable-supported bridges throughout the world. As Head of Product Development, I manage the development of LARSA’s legacy and emerging products and a small team of software engineers.

Founder GovTrack.us

In 2003 I founded what would become one of the world’s most visited free government information websites. GovTrack.us uses official government information plus our own original research to track the daily activities of the United States Congress. It is used by some 10 million individuals annually. Our work catalyzed the world-wide open government data movement.

Writing

On Open Government/Civic Tech

How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request

I made the first ever change to a law via pull request. (Nov. 25, 2018)

So you want to reform democracy?

Hello. You probably just wrote me an email about fixing democracy. (Nov. 22, 2015)

Open Government Data: The Book (2012/2014)

On Data Analysis

How that map you saw on FiveThirtyEight silences minorities, and other reasons to consider a cartogram.

(Feb. 12, 2016)

How a complex network of bills becomes a law: A new data analysis of text incorporation

(Jan. 7, 2017)

On Civic Hacking

Hackathon.guide

A logistical guide to running a successful technology hackathon. (2014)

Why We Hack (June 4, 2016)

What happened at Open Data Day DC 2016? (Mar. 12, 2016)

Other Projects

Mail-in-a-Box

Take back control of your email with this easy-to-deploy mail server in a box.

uslaw.link, a legal citation lookup tool.

ツ.life, an IDNA domain test.

Infinite Tree, a relaxing, infinitely-scrolling tree.

This is my pet turtle, Rupert, who has his own homepage and occassionally tweets.

PGP key:
keybase.io/joshdata / key.asc
5F4C 0E73 13CC D744 693B 2AEA B920 41F4 C10B DD81

“If you already know what recursion is, just remember the answer. Otherwise, find someone who is standing closer to Douglas Hofstadter than you are; then ask him or her what recursion is.” -- Andrew Plotkin