A couple of weekends ago, I attended Art Hack Day at Harvard. The event was put on by the Big Bad Lab, where we were proud to provide the data for the event through our APIs It was a pleasure getting to show off python-transparencydata and (ok, I’m biased here) python-sunlight.

The creative juices were really flowing throughout the 3-day hackathon, folks created some amazing projects, such as a vending machine bill acceptor that sucked 100 dollar bills at the same rate money has been spent this election cycle (it was really fast!), political speech karaoke, and a voting booth that just can’t accept “no”. Some other creative projects included an app that would process tweets from federal Senators and Representatives (twitter IDs found off the Sunlight Congress API), and a bulletin board was covered with flyers featuring (real!) numbers for lobbyists discovered through Influence Explorer.

All in all, it was a great event, and really showed what can get done with so many great hackers, artists and researchers stuffed together for a weekend!