AI Base Camp: Congressional Staff Exploring AI Adoption Hands-On
On June 2, POPVOX Foundation and Meridian International Center, in collaboration with the AI Staff Association, brought AI Base Camp to Rayburn 2128. This two-hour, open-house style event welcomed Congressional staff to explore AI skills at their own pace. Attendees got hands-on at six skills-based stations set up with cutting edge technology matched to their workflow and use cases.
AI Base Camp was tool-agnostic and skills-focused, designed to give attendees practical exposure to AI whether they had never opened an LLM (such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini) or were already curious about agentic AI. Staff cycled through the room at their own pace, spending time at the stations matching their interest and comfort level. All stations were either skill-development based (with use case examples that aligned with House and Senate AI guidance) or education-focused (giving staff first-hand exposure to AI technologies that they might be crafting policies for but have never seen in action).
The Stations
Packing Your Prompt introduced attendees to the basics of prompting: how to give an AI model clear, useful instructions from the start to improve performance, minimize hallucinations, and save time.
Finding Your Path helped staff think through where AI could fit into their existing workflows and daily tasks, not as an add-on but as a real part of how work gets done. Staff often fall into the habit of using AI for one task or purpose. This station was about breaking staff out of their AI routine and thinking through new workflow adoptions to elevate the impact AI can have on their capacity.
Building a Buddy System walked attendees through creating a custom bot (a Claude Project, ChatGPT Custom GPT, or Gemini Gem) tuned to a specific job or use case.
Trail Blazing gave staff a live look at vibe coding, with attendees bringing their own ideas and watching them take shape in real time.
Arts and Crafts covered AI-generated imagery and deepfake detection, giving staff practical tools for evaluating what they see online.
Reaching New Heights put attendees directly in the driver's seat with agentic AI tools (including OpenClaw, Perplexity, and Codex) inside POPVOX Foundation's AI Sandbox lab.
Congressional staff participating at hands-on stations at AI Base Camp.
What We Saw
The open-house format worked: staff came in at all experience levels and left having tried something new. Many had never seen a coding tool before and others who came in confident, walked away with new knowledge they did not know they were missing.
Staff exploring cutting-edge agentic AI systems on POPVOX Foundation’s AI Sandbox computers.
AI Base Camp was about building awareness and skills, not selling tools. It gave staff permission to explore without pressure, and an environment where they could ask questions to individuals who had created resources that mapped to real congressional use cases.
A screenshot of a dashboard tool that was vibe-coded in real time at AI Base Camp by attendees.
We are grateful to Meridian and the AI Staff Association for making this possible. Events like this are how Congressional staff and Members keep pace and continue to find their path for effective AI adoption.
