Inspiration:
We kept seeing posts on social media about real problems — a collapsed bridge in Pakistan, contaminated water in the US, a hospital just shutting down in Nigeria — and people had nowhere to actually report it. Like, the problems were real but they just kind of disappeared into the internet. We wanted to build something where people could post issues and have them stick somewhere public, where others could back them up.
What it does:
It's basically a community board for real-world problems. You fill out a short form — what's the issue, where, how bad is it — and it shows up on a live tracker that anyone can see. Other people can upvote your report so more serious issues bubble to the top. You can also filter by category (environment, infrastructure, health, etc.) or search for a specific place. The whole site works in 8 languages too, including Arabic which goes right-to-left.
How we built it:
Just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no frameworks, no backend, nothing fancy. All the translations are stored in one big JavaScript object and when you click a language, everything on the page updates at once. The issue list is stored in memory and re-renders whenever you filter, search, or submit something new. We also added a priority bar under each issue that fills up based on how many votes it has compared to the top-voted issue.
Challenges we ran into:
Arabic was honestly the hardest part. When you switch to Arabic the whole page has to flip right-to-left and we kept breaking the layout every time I tried to fix it. Also making sure every single label, placeholder, and button text was translated in all 8 languages took way longer than expected — there were so many little strings we kept missing. Getting the severity pills to visually reset properly without leaving old CSS classes stuck on them was also really annoying to debug.
Accomplishments that we're proud of:
Getting all 8 languages to actually work, including RTL for Arabic, felt really good. I'm also proud that the whole thing runs as one single HTML file — you could save it to your desktop and open it with no internet and it still works. And the fact that there's zero sign-up to use it was a priority from the start.
What we learned:
We learned that building for different languages is way more than just translating words. The text lengths are totally different, some languages need the whole layout mirrored, and you have to check every single piece of text on the page — not just the obvious stuff. We also learned that sometimes simple mechanics (like an upvote button) can actually solve a real problem, like figuring out which issues matter most without needing any algorithm.
What's next for Civic Pulse:
The biggest thing is adding a real database so reports actually save between sessions — right now everything resets on refresh. After that we want to add a map so you can see issues plotted by location, and maybe let people attach photos to their reports. Eventually we'd love to have verified government accounts that can update the status of an issue so communities know someone actually saw it.
The link we provided above is a link to the document with a code that you can run on one compiler
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