InShort

Learn about how Congress will affect you, in real time.

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Inspiration

A recent survey showed that 70% of Americans lacked basic civic literacy on topics related to the US Government. In a democracy, it’s not just a privilege but almost a necessity to form opinions that help shape the government we follow. source

Today’s generation has a new way of absorbing information, and it’s through short forms of content (Reels/Tiktoks/etc). So the idea of reading through a newspaper, let alone an entire bill, feels completely out of the question.

But these same bills have the power to affect our day-to-day, and make a lasting impact on our lives. So why shouldn’t there be a way for our generation to stay informed in a format that actually fits how we consume content?

The Solution

We built an iOS app that meets you where you are. InShort uses AI to learn what matters to you: your lifestyle, your interests, your needs, and then explains the bills that affect you most, simply and clearly. It’s like TikTok but for laws and political awareness.

InShort is designed for convenience. You only need to tell us the causes you care about, and we’ll take care of notifying you. If you feel strongly about a pending law, we give you the ability to contact your lawmaker with 1 click.

How we built it

We started off with an initial MVP using iOS native frameworks, and then we used Congress API to scrape over 500+ Congressional bills from which we made a vector database so that we can establish a recommender system for people to find the bills that are most relevant to them.

Then we added an AI chatbot using Groq personalized to the user, and familiar with Congressional law. For our recommender system, we fine-tuned the parameters for the cosine similarity search function to improve relevance for the user.

We hosted the backend for these AI features on an OVH server. Then we established a notification system that notifies people about the bills that they would care about.

Lastly, we improved user experience by providing people with a forum for public discourse that uses reinforcement learning to suggest more of what you would engage with. An algorithm suited for you.

And finally, we added the option to contact your lawmaker with a click of a button.

Who we are

We met on the Slack Intro channel, where we quickly connected over a shared passion for using technology to make civic engagement easier. What started as a group chat with 4 strangers, quickly turned into hours of brainstorming, building and problem solving together! For some of us, this was our first hackathon!

Challenges we ran into

We started a step behind. Our team spent the first few hours just brainstorming, throwing out ideas, scrapping them, and trying to find something we could all genuinely believe in. We didn’t want to build just another project for the sake of it, we wanted something that would stick. That took time.

We also had issue being that most of us have never worked on an IOS application before, and setting up a back-end server in within hackathon time constraints was pretty hard.

How we overcame them

Once we locked in on the idea, we divided work based on strengths, stayed up all night debugging the backend and connecting it to the frontend, and somehow put it all together just in time. (everything was broken at 4 AM). Integration was honestly the hardest part, between the AI API, the recommender system, and the app UI, getting it to feel seamless was rough. But we made it work.

Next steps!

InShort was limited by the scope of this Hackathon, but we hope to partner with nonprofits like Pew research in the future to spread civic engagement for people who grew up in the digital generation. Furthermore, this would generally be helpful for everyday people to keep track of the changes that matter.

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