Congress.io

Inspiration

Following the workings of government and politics is difficult. Executive orders, congressional legislation, and court opinions are often long, verbose, and obscure to find. Even for those who know how and where to find it, government actions rarely garner enough attention enter the public perception without considerable vigilance and proactivity. Congress.io is intended for the well-meaning but lost citizen who asks themself "I want to know more about my government, but I don't know how." It is designed to help users explore government sources in a centralized, authoritative, convenient, and helpful format.

What it does

Congress.io aggregates data from official government sources and presents simplified versions to the user. Currently, this only includes house bills. Users can scroll through like they would on social media to view bill titles and click on each to learn more. For bills with available summaries, those are displayed, and the user can also press the "Generate Summary" button to utilize Gemini AI and distill the essence of a bill down into a paragraph.

How we built it

Congress.io is built using the Next.js framework, although currently it's basically just a stateless client application, and there is no backend. It makes API calls to government sources like api.congress.gov, and calls the Gemini API for AI-generated summaries.

Built With

• ai
• gemini
• nextjs
• typescript