Joshua Tauberer


Dr. Joshua Tauberer is a civic hacker, open government activist, entrepreneur, and author. He is the creator and maintainer of the website GovTrack, a portal for information about legislation in Congress, and developer for , which makes Congressional Research Service Reports available to the public.

GovTrack

Tauberer created GovTrack in 2004 to make legislative information more easily accessible to everyone, providing research and tracking tools but also raw data feeds that third parties use to create other services. He conceived the idea for GovTrack during his freshman year at Princeton. The utility of the data that Tauberer made available on his site was part of the inspiration for Congressman Mike Honda's legislation to provide new sources of legislative data; Congress is now publishing legislative information as data.

Policy and activism

Tauberer has occasionally used these technical tools and others to advise policy, including publication of uses of GovTrack by Congressional IP addresses and FOIA requests regarding the DC government's open data administration.

Career

Tauberer is the president of , a consultant to GovReady PBC, and a senior technologist at LARSA, Inc.
He serves as a member of the D.C. government's and the , is the author of , and co-organized the now defunct yearly . Among his notable writings are "" and "."
Tauberer holds a Doctorate in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in psychology, from Princeton University in 2004, and attended Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School in Plainview, New York.

Interviews