This post was originally published on Medium

Yesterday was the 2016 National Day of Civic Hacking, a Code for America event that encourages people with technology and related skills to explore projects related to civil society and government. My friend Josh Tauberer wrote a thoughtful post earlier about the event …

This past Friday, the web portal to the US Federal government, USA.gov, organized hackathons across the US for programmers and data scientists to work with and analyze the data from their link-shortening service. It turns out that if you shorten a web link with bit.ly, the shortened link looks like 1.usa.gov/V6NpL …