Inspiration

Frontend &amp; Logic: Streamlit, Plotly
AI Backend: Anthropic Claude &amp; OpenAI (Fallback)
Data: Dynamic Pandas / CSV integration
Styling: Custom CSS (Glassmorphism, Dark Mode)

CivicLens: Participatory Budgeting Platform

UMD × Anthropic Hackathon 2026 Governance & Accessibility Track

💡 The Vision

CivicLens is an AI-powered participatory budgeting platform that bridges the gap between citizens and city planners. While most citizens find municipal budgets boring or impossible to comprehend, CivicLens gamifies the experience, teaching users about the fiscal realities of governance while acting as a massive sentiment analysis polling tool for city managers.

🚀 Key Features

AI-Powered Tradeoff Analysis (Claude)
- Powered by Anthropic's Claude API, users receive dynamic, deeply empathetic analyses of their budget tradeoffs, injected with realistic RAG-style references to city documents.
Interactive UI with Mandated Constraints
- Teach citizens that "free stuff isn't free." 55% of the $47 million budget is locked in legally mandated spending. Users must work within the constraints of reality.
The Local "Spotify Wrapped"
- Transform budgets into personalities. Users are algorithmically assigned Civic Profiles (e.g., "The Equalizer") with 1-click social sharing buttons to drive viral civic engagement.
Community Pulse (The Mayor's Dashboard)
- The B2B solution. The app aggregates all citizen slider data to give the City Council a real-time heatmap of what their constituents actually want, replacing the broken Town Hall model.
Interactive Revenue Adjustments
- Users can raise or lower Property Taxes.
Multilingual Access
- Complete 1-click translation of complex budget analyses into Spanish and Mandarin to give immigrant communities equal footing in civic planning.
SaaS Ready (BYO Budget)
- Upload any CSV (try the sample_baltimore_budget.csv) and the entire application instantly dynamically scales to your city.