In February, we broke the news that Cambridge, Mass.-based Quorum Analytics — a quantitative legislative data analytics startup founded by a group of Harvard University students — planned to relocate to the District after graduation. Now, DC Inno has learned that the newly minted D.C. tech company is launching a free First Look Program to those who make the wheel behind D.C.’s many congressional offices turn — Capitol Hill’s horde of interns.
The program will offer a free, unrestricted version of Quorum to select interns from early June until August 10. The Harvard-founded company will also be accepting applications on a rolling basis with the only criteria being that individuals must have already acquired a summer internship position.
The trial window will give interns and offices across the District a “quantitative window into the legislative process in order to enhance their work and save time and energy,” Quorum said in a statement.
As a system, the platform creates interactive visualizations, auto-updating statistics and organizes comprehensive congressional data to equip users with the tools to better navigate the legislative process.
Co-founder Alex Wirth told DC Inno: “Since we publicly launched at the end of January we have quadrupled our client base-adding clients like General Motors, The Club For Growth, and The Podesta Group. We have 21 people on our team this summer … and have moved to D.C. full time where we have received a warm welcome thanks to the generous support of the Washington D.C. Economic Partnership’s Live Free In D.C. Competition.”
Quorum's algorithms process more than 800 million data points to calculate different statistics about representative's legislative history — including information related to priority issue areas, cross-aisle and native party influence, ideology directive, voting history and whip percentages.
“Participants of the First Look Program will be able to write memos about what every Member of Congress has said on a particular issue, as Quorum is the only platform to have all of the Congressional tweets, press releases, and floor statements in the same place … participants will be able to help their offices identify who to target on a given issue with Quorum’s analytics around who is most active, influential, bipartisan, and effective as well as who those members work with most frequently,” Wirth told DC Inno.
Along with the software package, interns who are selected to use the service will be provided with free, hands-on training directly from the Quorum team at Washington D.C. Economic Partnership’s conference space, Wirth said.
“The expanded team and our new home in D.C will allow us to continue developing new features that we will roll out over the next several months and we are excited to be changing how Washington approaches the legislative process.”
