You can win $25,000 for the best pitch to disrupt government

Lincoln's annual Reboot Conference, an invitation-only event for right-of-center technologists interested in politics, will feature a new wrinkle this year: A $25,000 prize for the best government-disrupting idea.

Entrepreneurs will have the chance to make a "Shark Tank"-inspired pitch for a technology that modernizes some facet of government or regulation. They’ll have five minutes to present their ideas to a panel of judges from Firehouse Strategies, the public affairs firm that advised Marco Rubio's 2016 presidential campaign, and OpenGov, a company whose cloud-based technology helps cities better analyze and share financial data, and the data-analytics firm i360.

“We’re looking for the company that’s going to advance what tech is about; it enables people to make their own decisions,” said Aaron Ginn, co-founder of Lincoln, a conservative think-tank that looks to apply tech innovation to government to help it run more efficiently.

The competition, to be held June 30 at the W Hotel in San Francisco, culminates a four-day conference aimed at bringing together Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. It is open for entries.

Thursday's pitch event is part of a day-long series of sessions that include discussions about how big data is transforming every industry — politics included — and how the much-anticipated big-data showdown in the 2016 race for the White House might have played out (if the Republican party's presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, didn't throw water on that idea).

Also at Reboot, Alex Skatell, founder of the Independent Journal Review, will be speaking about what really happened last month when conservatives met with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to discuss the allegation of anti-conservative bias in the selection of articles to feature in the Trending Topic feature on the social network.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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