Joshua Tauberer is a civic hacker,

open government Open government is the governing doctrine which sustain that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight. In its broadest construction, it opposes reason of state and ...

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 EveryCRSReport.com, which makes Congressional Research Service Reports available to the public. Tauberer is also the lead developer for Mail-in-a-Box, an

Open Source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...

project for

mail server Within the Internet email system, a message transfer agent (MTA), or mail transfer agent, or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using SMTP. The terms mail server, mail exchanger, and MX host ...

hosting.

Early life

Tauberer attended Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School in

Plainview, New York Plainview is a hamlet and census-designated place (CDP) located near the North Shore of Long Island in the town of Oyster Bay in Nassau County, New York, United States. The population of the CDP was 27,100. The Plainview post office has t ...

, before going on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

in 2004. After Princeton, he earned a Doctorate in Linguistics from the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

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 Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ni ...

. The utility of the data that Tauberer made available on his site (and later became available on other sites) was part of the inspiration for Congressman

Mike Honda Michael Makoto "Mike" Honda (born June 27, 1941) is an American politician and former educator. A member of the Democratic Party, he served in Congress from 2001 to 2017. Initially involved in education in California, he first became active in ...

'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 Civic Impulse, LLC, a consultant to GovReady PBC, and a senior technologist at LARSA, Inc. He serves as a member of the D.C. government's Open Government Advisory Group and the Congressional Data Coalition, is the author of Open Government Data: the Book, and co-organized the now defunct yearly Open Data Day DC conference. Among his notable writings are "So You Want to Reform Democracy" and "How to Run a Successful Hackathon."

References

External links

Joshua Tauberer's Homepage

Joshua Tauberer's track record in Civic TechnologyGovTrack.usCivic Impulse, LLCA conversation with Joshua Tauberer about GovTrack

Interviews

on Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators
GovTrack opens up information on US legislature
by

Linux.com Linux.com is a website owned by the Linux Foundation. The goal of the site is to provide information about the developments and changes in Linux and related products. Linux.com offers free Linux tutorials, news and blogs, discussion forums and ...

Data crusader
by Princeton Alumni Weekly {{DEFAULTSORT:Tauberer, Joshua Year of birth missing (living people) Living people University of Pennsylvania alumni Open content activists Open government activists Free software programmers Princeton University alumni Open government in the United States People from Plainview, New York