Short Description: A 24/7 AI-powered pipeline that transforms complex environmental permits into viral social alerts and automated civic action letters.
Inspiration
Environmental registries are intentionally dense and jargon-heavy. We built EcoHawk to give the public a "digital lawyer"—someone who reads the fine print and alerts the community before the damage is done.
What it does
Scrapes: Monitors government registries for new pollution permits. Analyzes: Uses Gemini AI to strip jargon and score environmental risk. Alerts: Automatically generates and posts graphic carousels to Telegram. Advocates: DMs users deep-dive reports and drafts formal Reprimand Letters to local representatives on their behalf.
How we built it
$0 High-Performance Infrastructure: Leveraged GitHub Actions and local-first ChromaDB storage to run a full RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) stack with $0 monthly hosting overhead. RAG-Enhanced Intelligence: ** Integrated local vector search (using all-MiniLM-L6-v2) to give our AI "memory," allowing it to cite historical context in every permit rundown. **The "Reprimand Engine": Successfully bridged the gap between awareness and action by automating the transition from a social media hook to a formal, 5-paragraph objection letter via Gmail SMTP. Strict LLM Schema Enforcement: Used LangChain to force Gemini into a rigid pipe-delimited syntax, ensuring a 100% success rate for our automated Python graphics rendering engine.
Challenges we ran into
Extracting clean text from messy government DOM structures and fine-tuning the LLM to write professional legal objections while keeping the public-facing alerts in plain, accessible English.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Successfully building a 100% autonomous pipeline. EcoHawk can scrape, design, host imagery, and post to social media with zero human intervention and $0 monthly hosting fees.
What we learned
That high-performance AI agents don’t require expensive cloud databases. Using local Vector indices (ChromaDB) and free-tier automation (GitHub Actions) can power industrial-grade civic tech.
What's next for EcoHawk
Implementing Geo-fencing to send hyper-local push notifications whenever a permit is filed within 5km of a user’s home, and expanding the "Reprimand Engine" to target more platforms.
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