Quorom is Disrupting Lobbying with Networks
Alex Wirth and Jonathon Marks started Quorom in 2014, when they were still undergraduates. Two years later, they are being hailed as the Moneyball of political lobbying (Washingtonian). Their platform data mines all the information they can get about members of Congress, including voting decisions, cosponsorship of legislation, official statements, and social media posts. It analyzes all these data through an algorithm not dissimilar to Google’s PageRank algorithm. The result is a report detailing which legislators are the strongest influencers and with whom they work together. If you want to know which members of Congress will be best at passing a certain piece of legislation, Quorom has the answer.
Abstractly, Quorom is built on networks. Its bedrock is built on the concepts of strong and week ties. It uses information networks to asses which legislators have the strongest ties to a given issue, and how strong their influence is. It uses social networks to see which legislators are the best at influencing their peers, and which legislators have strong ties with each other. In a process historically run by cigar-toting lobbyists, Quorom has disrupted the norm. How can we be sure this is truly networks and not some political-specific process? Before Quorom, Marks did a summer internship at a computational-biochemistry lab. “It turns out that the math that you use to understand the most important proteins in a network,” says Marks, “is really not that different than the math you use to understand which members of Congress are most important in a network.”