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Alex Wirth | Cofounder
alex@quorum.us | 505-231-7733
New Legislative Startup Launches Bringing Quantitative Focus To Washington
Washington DC, January 26th, 2015: Today Quorum Analytics Inc., a new startup
founded by two Harvard undergraduates, publicly launched Quorum, an online
legislative strategy platform that offers unique quantitative insights into the U.S.
Congress. Featuring interactive visualizations and up-to-date statistics for every
Member, bill, vote, committee, issue area, and congressional district, Quorum provides
a new way to see, explain, and influence the legislative process.
Quorum’s algorithms process over 800 million data points collected from bills, votes,
amendments, floor statements, press releases, tweets, and Census Bureau statistics to
give users access to quantitative member and issue profiles, interactive demographic
data, and state-of-the-art productivity tools.
“Quorum is an emerging game changer for Washington,” said Gerry Sikorski,
Government Section Leader at Holland & Knight, a top D.C. law firm. “It has provided
Holland and Knight with unique quantitative insights that have informed our decisions
and strengthened our clients.”
In addition to Holland & Knight, Quorum’s initial clients include The Glover Park Group,
The United Nations Foundation’s Better World Campaign, The First Focus Campaign for
Children, and The Navajo Nation.
Quorum’s Member Profiles offer statistics on the top issues that each Member
sponsors, cosponsors, or amends bills in as well as information on the Members that
Quorum Analytics, Inc. | quorum.us | @QuorumAnalytics
they cosponsor, vote with, tweet at, or mention most frequently. “Quorum provides
quantitative answers to what have previously been qualitative questions about
Members’ legislative priorities and most frequent collaborators,” said Quorum’s
Cofounder, Alex Wirth, who has served as a White House Intern and a U.S. Senate
Page.
The platform also enables users to interactively explore over 100 statistics on each
Member’s legislative history in over 1,000 different issue areas such as with-party
voting percentage, average number of cosponsors, and number of bills out of
committee.
“We’re excited to be able to not only aggregate data from a wide variety of
Congressional sources,” said Cofounder, Jonathan Marks, “but also to organize, analyze,
and present it in a way that’s never been done before.”
Quorum’s extensive demographic data allows users to visualize and rank all 435
congressional districts by over 1,000 different demographic statistics such as education
levels and unemployment rates. Users can also graph up to four statistics
simultaneously across districts to identify outliers and emerging trends.
“Quorum harnesses Congressional data in the blink of an eye. It is a window into the
world of lawmaking – corralling volumes of legislative information into a readable,
manageable form. For Congress-watchers, Quorum is a dream come true.” said Maggie
Williams, Director of the Harvard University Institute of Politics.
In addition to this substantial amount of organized data, Quorum also offers
productivity tools that help users capitalize on all the platform has to offer. Quorum’s
Bill Text Comparison feature allows users to identify additions, deletions and
modifications between varying versions of a single bill or multiple related bills, and the
platform’s Scorecard Creator allows users to quickly compare and rank the votes of all
535 Members of Congress.
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Quorum’s unique Advanced Search tool combs through 225,000 congressional press
releases, 900,000 tweets, 36,000 bills, and 200,000 floor statements to offer a one-of-akind research resource. “Our team has worked very hard to ensure that the answers to
incredibly specific questions are only a few clicks away. For instance, if you’re looking
for press releases from Texas Republicans that mention the House version of the
Keystone XL pipeline bill (H.R. 5682) and mention the phrase ‘job creation’, Quorum
makes it easy to find the answers you need,” said Marks.
Marks and Wirth, who lead product and business development respectively, have been
working on the platform since last winter and lead a team from Harvard, MIT, and The
George Washington University. To date, the Quorum team has won The Harvard
Innovation Challenge, the international Queen's Entrepreneur’s Competition, The
Harvard Ventures Pitch Competition, The George Washington University Pitch
Competition, and The Harvard Hackfest. They were also semi-finalists in the MIT 100k
competition.
“After a year of work and over 100,000 lines of code we are incredibly excited to bring
Quorum’s data-driven approach to Washington,” said Marks.
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About Quorum
Quorum is an online legislative strategy platform that provides unique quantitative
insights into the U.S. Congress. Featuring interactive visualizations and up-to-date
statistics for every Member, bill, vote, committee, issue area, and congressional district,
Quorum is changing the way people see, explain, and influence the legislative process.
More information about Quorum and Quorum Analytics Inc. can be found at
www.quorum.us.
Quorum Analytics, Inc. | quorum.us | @QuorumAnalytics