Inspiration
We were inspired to improve the sense of civic duty within local communities after seeing the low voter turnout in the recent 2025 Ontario provincial election. It made us think about how disconnected many people feel from local issues. We wanted to create something that encourages people to care about their neighborhoods and participate in improving them.
What it does
CivicDuty is a platform that allows residents to report problems in their local communities, such as infrastructure issues, safety concerns, or public maintenance problems.
Users can submit reports directly through the app and earn points for contributing to their neighborhood. By gamifying civic engagement, the platform encourages more people to actively participate in improving their communities.
How we built it
We built CivicDuty using a modern full-stack setup:
Frontend: React with TailwindCSS
Backend: Flask
Database: MongoDB
AI Model: Used to help process and categorize reports
This stack allowed us to quickly prototype a responsive interface while building a backend capable of handling reports and AI-powered analysis.
Challenges we ran into
One of our biggest challenges was getting the AI model to work reliably with our backend and data pipeline. Integrating it into the application and making it produce useful outputs took significant debugging and experimentation.
We also ran into issues with our mobile setup when Expo broke during development, which prevented our mobile version from working as intended.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud that we were able to build a fully functional demo of CivicDuty within a short timeframe.
Despite technical setbacks, we successfully implemented the core features: submitting reports, storing them in the database, and integrating AI into the workflow.
What we learned
Through this project we learned:
How to build a full-stack web application
How to integrate an AI model into a production-style pipeline
How to work with React, Flask, MongoDB, and Tailwind together
Lessons about mobile development and tooling using Expo
What's next for CivicDuty
In the future, we want to expand CivicDuty with:
A fully working mobile application
Better AI models to categorize and prioritize reports
Integration with municipal systems so reports can reach local governments
More community features and incentives to encourage civic participation
If you want, I can also help you:
make this sound more like a hackathon winner submission
add technical depth (judges love that)
or shorten it for Devpost.
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