MyCity

MyCity uses AI journalists to monitor official information sources, distill complex content, and generate clear briefs that help locals stay informed about what’s happening around them.

Comment

I'm so glad that I managed to finish my first full-stack project as a first-time hackathon attendee.

Inspiration

Local news deserts have been expanding rapidly across the U.S., with 3,300 newspapers closing over the past two decades. While short videos on emerging platforms offer quick updates, the MyCity portal serves as a reliable and accurate source of truth, helping people stay informed about what’s happening in their own cities.

What it does

MyCity is a web app—soon to be primarily mobile—that crawls selected official information sources at carefully chosen intervals to deliver timely updates. Drawing on the expertise of seasoned journalists to identify authoritative sources, the app uses one-shot and few-shot prompt engineering to guide its professional writing. The result is relevant, bite-sized, and unbiased information briefs—free of fluff.

How we built it

The stack includes Python, Claude API, SQLite, FastAPI, Vercel V0, and React.

Challenges we ran into

The two secret ingredients of this project—gathering meaningful information based on lived human experience and producing strong content—also posed the biggest challenges. Properly guiding LLMs in professional news writing requires extra onboarding time. For instance, when condensing lengthy documents such as city council meeting minutes, considerable effort went into prompting the Claude API to generate high-quality summaries. Well-crafted few-shot prompts were essential in these cases.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The current prototype includes content relevant to commuters, such as traffic updates and major public transportation alerts. In the Fremont city prototype, the current workflow can handle the daily output of two full-time journalists already. In a newsroom setting, this tool would allow professional journalists to focus on more creative and investigative tasks.

What's next for MyCity

We plan to expand the Fremont MyCity prototype with additional local sources and features. Another section of the app will allow users to receive updates from various local event calendars. Users can like or skip events to build a personalized MyCity event calendar. In the next phase, we will also develop a mobile-first version of the app.

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