Debrief.

Inspiration

A need to understand how to affect sustainability and other important issues through legal action, for the average folk.

What it does

Summarizes bills in concise, easy-to-understand language, what the contents of a legislative bill are.

How we built it

We started with web scraping the Texas legislative bills, parsing the HTML for further analysis. We used this raw bill data to produce AI generated summaries and titles for each bills, storing all the information in a database. We then created the website using NextJS and tailwind css to display these bills to users.

Challenges we ran into

It is hard to work when tired. OpenAI API really likes rate limiting, which made it difficult to process a large amount of data at a time. Formatting issues with css. Passing props around in NextJS was difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The frontend looks really good for the time we had to work on it. Getting the filter search options to be functional. Having a working product.

What we learned

On the engineering front, we learned a lot about Tailwind-CSS and NextJS.

On the design front, we learned how to pass off UI designs and work with developers to implement as best as feasibly possible.

Overall, we also shared a learning experience in scoping and coming up with a solid foundation and base idea that we built upon, with a map for stretch goals and next steps after this hackathon.

What's next for Debrief.

Next steps for Debrief. include scaling up to include legislation from more governments, ranging from other US state governments to US federal legislation; implementing mockup screens that we didn't have time to program, and introducing more automation and streamlining the A.I. process used here. We also want to implement a sort of newsletter so that people can “follow” bills of a certain type.