PromiseChains

📖 About the Project

🔍 Inspiration

In modern politics, promises are often forgotten or distorted once elections are over. I wanted to build a transparent system where anyone can verify political pledges and track their fulfillment over time.
The inspiration came from seeing fact-checking organizations struggle with scalability — and realizing AI could automate much of that process, while blockchain could guarantee trust and immutability.

📚 What I Learned

Through this project, I learned:

• How Natural Language Processing (NLP) models can match campaign promises with real-world actions.
• How news APIs and government open data can be integrated into an automated tracking pipeline.
• How blockchain’s immutability and decentralization can be leveraged to build tamper-proof public records.
• The importance of designing for user trust and clear visualization in civic tech.

🛠️ How I Built It

1. Data Collection
   
   • Gathered political pledge data from open election platforms.
     
   • Used news APIs (e.g., GDELT, NewsAPI) to fetch relevant articles and announcements.
     
2. AI Analysis
   
   • Employed an LLM-based classifier to map news/events to specific pledges.
     
   • Calculated a fulfillment score for each promise.
     
3. Blockchain Recording
   
   • Recorded fulfillment data on a public blockchain (Polygon testnet in the prototype).
     
   • Used smart contracts to store pledge ID, timestamp, and fulfillment status.
     
4. Frontend Visualization
   
   • Built a simple web dashboard using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to display:
     • Candidate list
       
     • Promises and their fulfillment scores
       
     • Immutable blockchain transaction IDs for verification

🚧 Challenges

• Data Quality
  Political statements often lack standardization, making NLP matching non-trivial.
• Entity Disambiguation
  Ensuring that a news article’s “policy” matches the exact pledge and candidate required careful prompt engineering and model tuning.
• Blockchain Cost & Speed
  Deciding how frequently to write to the blockchain without incurring excessive gas fees.
• User Experience
  Balancing transparency (showing blockchain hashes) with accessibility for non-technical users.

✨ Next Steps

• Integrate multilingual support for global use.
• Add community fact-checking with governance tokens to allow users to challenge or confirm AI results.
• Expand to include economic and environmental policy tracking.

Built With

• react