We’re thrilled to announce that between now and March 15, 2020, we are recruiting for our 2020 Congressional Innovation Scholars program! We’re looking for between six and eight technologists to build the 2020 class— our largest cohort yet.
If you’ve recently finished, or are on the cusp of finishing a technical degree program, we hope you’ll apply.
We launched the Congressional Innovation Scholars program in 2018 in response to overwhelming interest from students and faculty. While building TechCongress we’d heard a common refrain: there were a small but sizeable number of students coming out of computer science, data science, informatics, engineering and other technical degrees were interested in using their skills to solve tough public problems. These students wanted to serve in government. Rather that following the standard prescribed route to the tech industry, they wanted to apply their skills to issues like biometric privacy, or the future of work, or data security.
And we saw a big gap: no programs existed to bring this expertise into the public sphere, and government had yet to adapt to source this expertise itself. I explained at the time that:
Government ... isn’t equipped to hire for technology expertise. First, people hire people like themselves. Lawyers are biased towards hiring lawyers. Moreover, just as university faculty don’t know where to send a budding computer scientist with an interest in policy, government staff have no idea where to look for someone that understands technology, and who also possess the soft skills and emotional intelligence required to perform in a highly collaborative, many times bureaucratic context. The demand side—government—hasn’t used the product enough to know where to find it and what attributes are important.
We built the Congressional Innovation Scholars program to bridge the gap between the supply of tech talent that wants to do this work, and the need for talent within the government itself.
The program is almost an exact clone of our program targeted to mid-career technologists, the Congressional Innovation Fellowship. Our Congressional Innovation Scholars start their fellowship with a two-week orientation program in Washington— a bootcamp and skills-training about Congressional process and procedure. We then spend two weeks helping them find a placement with a Member of Congress or Congressional Committee that aligns with their interests, expertise and politics.
And from there, fellows serve as tech policy advisors to their office, working on issues like 5G deployment, data privacy, encryption, defense procurement reform, health IT, election security, autonomous vehicle and drone regulations, and much, much more.
We started the program with our first Congressional Innovation Scholar in 2018. We grew the program to two additional fellows last year. Our 2019 Congressional Innovation Scholars— Katerina Sedova and Josh Vasko—are serving in the United States Senate through April 2020.
The program will run for ten months, starting in June 2020 through April 2021. Our Innovation Scholars earn a $55,000 / year-equivalent stipend, and receive funding for relocation, health care and fellowship travel.
To date, we’ve sent 29 technologists to Capitol Hill. They’ve done groundbreaking work like passing the OPEN Government Data Act into law, thereby creating a Chief Data Officer at every federal agency, and organizing Congress’s first hearing on facial recognition.
The opportunity is tremendous. Technology is reshaping society in fundamental ways. Congress needs your skills and expertise. We hope you’ll consider applying.