CivicBrief

Inspiration

Most people don't tune out of politics because they don't care, they tune out because it's exhausting, polarizing, and inaccessible, and we built CivicBrief to fix that.

What it does

CivicBrief transforms long-form political content into short, unbiased, digestible clips that link back to the original source so users can always go deeper.

How we built it

We used AI APIs to automatically identify key moments in long-form video, extract meaningful clips, and surface them in a clean, scrollable interface.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest problem wasn't technical, it was editorial, specifically how to ensure every clip was fair, accurate, and never misleading without its original context.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a working prototype that surfaces genuinely meaningful political moments rather than just the loudest or most dramatic ones, without telling users what to think.

What we learned

Building CivicBrief taught us that bias isn't always intentional, sometimes it's just an incomplete truth, and that the hardest problems in civic tech are rarely the technical ones.

What's next for CivicBrief

We're expanding to cover speeches, town halls, and congressional hearings, with personalized feeds based on issues users care about so any first-time voter can get up to speed in under 5 minutes.

Built With

• claude