ShowUp HTX

Inspiration

Houston residents don't live under one local government. They live under a whole stack of them. A single address can fall under:

Houston City Council
Harris County Commissioners Court and the County Judge
a constable and justice of the peace precinct
the Harris County Flood Control District
the Port of Houston Authority
a school district
often a Municipal Utility District (MUD), a small special district that sets part of your property tax, issues bonds, and holds its own board elections

On top of that are homeowners associations and other organizations that shape daily life.

Each of these bodies posts its information on its own website, often hard to find, and local news rarely covers them in time. As a result, most people don't know which bodies they live under, when those bodies meet, or what they're deciding. By the time a tax rate change or a school decision reaches them, the meeting where they could have spoken is over.

It started with a merit badge

This project began with a Scouting merit badge. One of our teammates was coordinating communication with his Municipal Utility District, Harris County MUD 489, as part of the badge requirements. While looking up which MUD he lived in, he found that friends who live about a two-minute walk away are in a completely different MUD. Two neighbors on almost the same street can pay different local taxes and answer to different boards, and neither of them likely knows it. That showed us how many separate governing bodies there are in Houston, and how hard it is to even find out which ones you belong to.

The same problem, at a bigger scale

We saw the same thing with school boards. In February 2026, HISD's Board of Managers voted 9–0 to close 12 schools. Parent meetings at affected campuses were held only about a week before the vote. One parent told FOX 26 the district kept describing the closures "as if it's a proposal," even as families planned around them as final. At the vote, many speakers called the decision abrupt and said the community hadn't had enough input. The district did hold more than 20 parent meetings, but families still felt they found out too late to make a difference.

The information existed. It just didn't reach people early or clearly enough.

Who we talked to

We asked our parents how they hear about local government decisions. They told us these bodies almost never communicate with residents directly. Sometimes they hear through community news, but rarely with enough notice to attend a meeting, comment, or vote. As they put it: they get enough information to know something happened, but not early enough to take part.

What it does

ShowUp HTX starts with your address.

Lookup. Enter your address and choose what describes you: student, parent, renter, or homeowner. The app finds the local governing bodies you live under and lists them in order of how much they affect you, each with a plain-language explanation.
Weekly brief. A news-style page that sums up the week across all your local governments, in two sections:
- Coming up: you can still act. Upcoming meetings and decisions, with the date and how to take part.
- Decided this week. What was decided, and whether the outcome has been posted yet.

Every item explains what it means for you and links to the original source document.

Live timeline. Every update as it's posted, filterable by topic, with no notifications. For anyone who wants the full picture.
Speak up. A guided flow to prepare a public comment: how to register with that specific government, writing your comment in your own words with AI feedback that never takes a side, and practicing with a timer.
Text alerts. Texts only for major events that match published rules: a proposed tax rate increase, a bond election, a board or trustee election, a school closure or rezoning vote, or a superintendent change. Alerts arrive before the vote, so there's still time to act. The alert rules and sign-up are built; texting switches on once carrier registration is approved.
English and Spanish throughout.

For the demo, we cover addresses in HISD and CFISD.

How we built it

Frontend: Next.js 16, React, and TypeScript, styled with Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui
Database: Supabase (PostgreSQL)
AI: Google Gemini, through OpenRouter, for plain-language summaries of agenda items, extracting items from hard-to-parse agendas, and feedback on draft comments
Address and boundary data:
- U.S. Census Geocoder (address to coordinates)
- City of Houston and Harris County GIS boundary files
- TCEQ water district boundaries (MUDs)
- Harris Central Appraisal District (HCAD) jurisdiction data
Agendas: Legistar and PrimeGov feeds, plus board agendas from HISD and CFISD
Alerts: Twilio for SMS, Web Push for browser notifications
Languages: next-intl (English and Spanish)
Testing: Vitest
Hosting: Vercel, with scheduled jobs that pull new agendas

Challenges we ran into

Agendas come in every format. Some governments publish through established platforms like Legistar, so we wrote code-based scrapers for those. MUDs and other smaller sources post PDFs, some of them scanned, so we used Gemini to extract the agenda items.
Matching addresses to the right boundaries. Finding the correct MUD and precinct for an address, and checking the results against HCAD's records.
Deciding what's "important" without bias. Instead of letting AI decide, we wrote fixed, published alert rules.
Keeping AI summaries accurate. Every summary is labeled as AI-written and links to its official source document.
SMS carrier registration took longer than expected, so texting isn't switched on yet.
Splitting the work across five teammates and connecting the parts into one app.

What's next for ShowUp HTX

Cover more MUDs and other special districts across Harris, Fort Bend, and Montgomery counties.
Switch on text alerts once carrier registration is approved.
Partner with schools, libraries, and neighborhood groups to reach people who aren't already engaged.
Add a renter view that shows how these taxes affect rent.
Expand beyond Houston: Texas has over a thousand MUDs, and the same address-based approach works anywhere with overlapping local governments.