Briefly.

Inspiration

As students who are passionate about making a difference in our communities, we realized the crucial importance of staying informed about the laws and bills that impact our lives. However, navigating the complex legislative system can be a daunting task, filled with mountains of information that can be overwhelming and confusing.

That's why we decided to take matters into our own hands and create Briefly – a revolutionary app designed to make legislature more accessible to citizens, especially students whose futures are most impacted by these laws. With Briefly, you can quickly and easily stay up-to-date on the latest bills and laws coming into effect, without being bogged down by extraneous information.

We are incredibly passionate about empowering citizens to take an active role in shaping their communities, and we truly believe that Briefly can help make that a reality. So whether you're a student looking to make your voice heard, or a concerned citizen seeking to stay informed, we invite you to join us and experience the power of Briefly for yourself!

What it does

Briefly allows you to stay up-to-date on the latest bills introduced in government. With Briefly, you'll be able to quickly scan through the government database to find the bills that matter most to you. What's more, our cutting-edge technology, powered by Cohere's advanced AI, will summarize each bill into easy-to-digest snippets, saving you time and energy. But that's not all – Briefly also makes it easy to take action. Using Cohere's generation technology, the app will even generate a sample email that you can send to your representatives to express your thoughts on a particular bill. Plus, with the ability to filter bills based on keywords and state, you'll never miss out on the bills that matter most to you. Stay informed and make your voice heard with Briefly.

How we built it

The framework we used is React.js, Next.js, Node.js, and Typescript. We leveraged Cohere AI technology to generate and summarize bodies of text. We also utilized LegiScan’s API to gather information on bills and generate search results of filtered bills.

Challenges we ran into

There were many moving parts to our build, and it was a challenge to integrate them all. Many of these technologies were also new to us, and we had to learn a lot of it on the fly. Using Typescript was also a challenge as it increased the complexity of the code compared to just Javascript.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud that we created a product that has legitimate real world applications that could be helpful to many people trying to educate themselves. Moreover, we are very proud that despite the many roadblocks caused by having to learn much of the build from scratch, we persevered as a team and worked together to create a great product!

What we learned

If you have a great goal and a supportive team, anything is possible! Learning new techniques is daunting, but not insurmountable, and the payoff is extremely rewarding.

What's next for Briefly.

Our passion for empowering citizens and promoting civic education knows no bounds! We plan on expanding our services to include even more exciting features that will make staying informed and taking action easier than ever before.

For starters, we're working on adding the ability to email your representatives directly from our website. This means that with just a few clicks, you'll be able to reach out to your elected officials and make your voice heard on the issues that matter most to you.

But that's not all – we're also developing a feature that will provide you with the contact information of your representatives based on your zip code. This will make it even easier for you to connect with the people who have the power to make a real difference in your community.

And of course, our ultimate goal is to promote Briefly to as many people as possible, so that we can help make civic education a top priority for everyone. We believe that every citizen deserves the opportunity to stay informed and take action on the issues that impact their future, and we're dedicated to making that a reality.

Built With

• cohere
• legiscan
• next.js
• node.js
• react.js
• typescript