congress.ai

congress.ai helps by providing a vibe check on representatives based on their actual voting history and ideology with bill summaries. Stay informed, reject partisan voting, and vibe check democracy.

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Inspiration

Isaac is a policy wonk. The application of technology in policy is outdated. And you know what's great at summarizing policy? LLMs!

A well-informed democracy should know what it's representatives are up to. So, let's vibe check the representatives and vibe check the democracy.

What it does

The project does two things:

  1. Gives a summary of bills that are passed through congress in understandable, approachable language.
  2. Gives a voting record and a general police stance (i.e. "vibe") of a politician based on the bills they voted for and against.

How we built it

The frontend was built using AWS Amplify in JavaScript. The frontend pings a MongoDB database.

The database was filled by a backend that scraped the US Congress website. It collects information about bills that were voted on and summarizes them through AWS Bedrock. It gets a roll call of votes on that bill. It then creates a voting record for a representative that cross references the bill and their voting decision.

Whenever a representative is selected, Bedrock is pinged with the summaries of bills they voted for/against. That creates the "vibe" check.

Challenges we ran into

Storing unformatted data is tough. So is scraping government websites that are (surprisingly) using JS.

Also, we couldn't figure out how to host the website on AWS. It's all local right now.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For some of us, this was our first time working in JS (or on frontend in general). That's pretty hype, especially for a first-year. Having a team of chillers is a big deal.

What we learned

JavaScript, MongoDB, AWS Bedrock, AWS Amplify, Selenium.

What's next for Congress.ai

Vibe checking democracy!

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