Agora

Inspiration:

We were inspired by the pressing challenges facing American democracy today. Statistics show that over 70% of Americans fail a basic civic literacy quiz, and most people are unaware of how policies directly impact them. This is compounded by extreme political polarization, biased information, and an overload of information that leaves citizens confused. With 86% of people viewing political violence as a significant problem, and data showing a widening gap between political parties over the last century, we felt compelled to create a tool that fosters understanding and informed participation.

What it does:

Agora is an educational platform designed to turn passive citizens into active, informed participants in democracy. It tackles political illiteracy and polarization through three novel features:

Bill Tracking: We provide detailed breakdowns of bills from all stages in Congress and, uniquely, analyze their personal impact on the user based on their demographics to increase awareness.

Representative Map: This feature congregates comprehensive information about a congressman's background, policies, and financial contributions into a single, easy-to-use tool.

LLM Debater: Users can engage with accurate AI-generated personas of real politicians in a Q&A or a debate format. This interactive discussion can be centered on custom topics, specific bills, or court cases, providing firsthand clarity on opposing viewpoints.

How we built it

We took a data-driven approach to build Agora. Our system sources information from a variety of reliable APIs and websites, including Congress.gov, FEC.gov, X.com, and Wikipedia. This data is processed using a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) model, which pulls relevant evidence snippets from the sources. These snippets are then fed into Gemini 2.5 Pro, which generates our two primary outputs: the Politician Persona for the debater and a detailed Bill Risk Report. This architecture ensures our outputs are grounded in factual, up-to-date information.

Challenges we ran into:

Ensuring the robustness and safety of a political AI platform was a significant challenge. A key hurdle was making the LLM personas consistently and accurately represent a politician's real-world opinions without deviation. We also had to implement filters to block inappropriate topics and ensure the debates remained productive. Furthermore, we worked to model realistic political dynamics, ensuring that personas from the same party generally support each other while those from opposing parties generally disagree, reflecting real-world alignments.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have created an educational platform that builds political literacy in a simple and approachable way. A major accomplishment is the LLM Debater, which successfully generates accurate political personas that consistently represent a politician's views. This allows users to gain firsthand clarity on opposing viewpoints in a novel, interactive way. By providing a tool that helps users form an educated opinion, we believe Agora effectively reduces the impact of environmental biases and empowers citizens to become more active participants in democracy.

What we learned:

Through developing Agora, we learned how to architect a system that synthesizes vast amounts of complex political data into simple, personalized, and actionable insights. We learned that by providing clear, unbiased information and tools for direct comparison—like the debater—it's possible to help users see beyond partisan rhetoric. The project reinforced the idea that technology can be a powerful force for education and civic engagement, helping to bridge the gap in understanding that contributes to political polarization.

What's next for Agora:

We have a clear roadmap for future development to expand Agora's impact. Our next steps include:

User Discussion: We plan to add community features that allow for active discussions between users and with the political personas, creating a modern forum for civic engagement .

News Updates: We will integrate live news updates related to specific politicians, providing users with timely information through individual text channels.

Geopolitics: Our vision includes expanding the platform to cover global politics, with information on geopolitical issues and conflicts, and introducing personas of global leaders.