Civic Pulse: Your Local Civic AI

The problem

Local government decisions affect our homes, neighbourhoods, public services and public money. Yet finding out who represents us, what a council is deciding, and where the supporting evidence comes from can mean navigating disconnected websites, lengthy agendas and difficult-to-follow public records.

Civic Pulse explores a simpler approach: ask a question in plain English and follow the answer back to its sources.

Our solution

Civic Pulse is a civic intelligence experience that connects natural-language questions with structured tools, official public information and traceable evidence. Instead of treating an AI-generated answer as the final word, it makes source provenance, uncertainty and missing information part of the experience.

For the Alexa+ hackathon track, we built an explicitly simulated Alexa+ web experience. Users can type questions into a conversational interface, see the tools being called, and inspect the evidence behind the response. This is a working web simulation, not an officially deployed Alexa+ Add-on.

What can it do?

1. Find your local representatives

Ask, “Who represents me in SW19?” Civic Pulse resolves the area, retrieves representative information and presents supporting sources. It also makes the postcode-based demonstration limitations clear.

2. Follow a council decision

Ask, “What is Merton Council deciding?” The demonstration follows a real civic record concerning the Rainbow Industrial Estate planning application 25/P1654, associated with agenda item 5 and Meeting 4712 in Merton.

Crucially, the record retains its not_confirmed decision status. Civic Pulse does not turn incomplete evidence into a claim that a decision has been made.

3. Inspect the evidence trail

The experience exposes tool activity, source references, retrieval information and limitations, helping users distinguish sourced facts from information that is unavailable or still needs verification.

How we built it

Civic Pulse combines a React, Vite and TypeScript frontend with a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server and an Alexa+ simulation gateway. Its MCP implementation targets the 2025-11-25 specification and exposes four tools for structured civic information retrieval.

The system separates the conversational interface, tool execution and source retrieval. It includes explicit handling for unavailable sources, transport failures, empty results and uncertain decision status.

For the AWS Builder mini-challenge, we used Kiro, Kiro CLI and Kiro Crew as development tools to support a read-only architecture audit, identify implementation risks and improve the container startup architecture. We do not claim that Civic Pulse uses runtime AWS infrastructure.

Open-source contribution

Alongside Civic Pulse, we prepared a separate contribution to EventSource, an open-source Server-Sent Events library. The contribution addresses event dispatch continuing after an event listener closes the connection, with a regression test and a proposed fix.

Pull request: https://github.com/EventSource/eventsource/pull/364

What comes next?

Our longer-term vision is a civic paper trail: a clear, evidence-linked way to follow public claims and events through documents, decisions, organisations, public money, contracts and outcomes.

The goal is not to make AI sound certain. It is to help people ask better questions, inspect the evidence and see what remains unverified.

Civic Pulse: ask the question, follow the evidence.

Built With

• ai
• alexa+
• docker
• github
• kiro
• kiro-cli
• kiro-crew
• model-context-protocol-(mcp)
• node.js
• openstreetmap
• public
• python
• react
• typescript
• vite