EBOE-101

EBOE-101 makes Edison school board meetings transparent and accessible with AI-powered summaries and community-driven feedback, keeping the community informed and engaged in new changes.

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Inspiration

The Edison Board of Education meetings are incredibly important, but they are typically held on weekday nights when parents, students, and working residents simply don't have the time to attend in person. While the Board releases YouTube recordings shortly after, these videos are often over three hours long and most people simply don't have hours to spare to find out what happened. Their meetings (date, time, and location) aren't actively publicized, leaving most of the community unaware that they are even happening. This creates a massive gap where residents lose their voice and influence on local policies. Furthermore, Edison is a highly diverse community where many residents speak English as a second language, creating an additional barrier to participation. We wanted to build a centralized platform that solves all of these issues—breaking down time, awareness, and language barriers to give a voice back to the community.

What it does

EBOE-101 (Edison Board of Education 101) is a community hub that makes what happens in our school district clearer, more honest, and easier to get involved with. The platform uses AI to turn hours-long meeting videos into summaries, along with a language translator, so everyone in our diverse community can stay up to date. It also hosts a chatbot to clarify any questions that the users asks. To make sure nobody misses a meeting, we also put a clear upcoming schedule right next to a community feedback section where users can select a meeting date, drop their background, and share their concerns with the EBOE. Additionally, the AI sums up the community feedback into a direct pipeline for the Board of Education, so the board members get a clear picture of exactly what the community needs and how to help. Lastly, we created a newsletter that informs the user about upcoming meeting dates and surveys while including an abridged summary of the most recent meeting.

How we built it

We designed EBOE-101 using Base44 and Apify to quickly create our web application. We mostly focused on building a simple, user-friendly frontend through Base44 so that everyone can easily navigate the schedules, summaries, and surveys with ease. Additionally, we also used Apify to automate data collection --- videos and their transcripts --- and handle gathering the necessary meeting content, running it through translation and summarization tools, and structuring the community's survey responses into an organized format that is ready for the Board of Education to review.

As for the AIs, we utilized DeepL, Claude, and Gemini. DeepL is strictly used to translate between languages. Unfortunately, it is not able to translate to Indian languages --- languages that are common in the Edison community. To combat this, we used Gemini for its quick(er) and accurate translations. We use Claude for the summaries and chat bot responses for its ability to analyze lengthy text (transcripts are VERY long) and responses based on logical thinking and reasoning.

Challenges we ran into

We definitely lost some time earlier in the week, as we struggled a bit with procrastination and spent a lot of time debating/agreeing on the right solution to build. When it came to actually putting it all together, we hit a snag when trying to find the perfect low-code platform that could handle and properly navigate exactly what we wanted to do. It took a decent amount of trial and error to settle on a stack that would let us easily build out the frontend while still allowing us to connect our AI and automation smoothly.

Additionally, Base44's native scraper was unable to scrape the EBOE's YouTube channel, so we had to utilize a third party application (Apify) to get the job done. Using the scraper and hooking it up to Base44 took a lot of time to figure out, and it took us more time to debug and create a schedule for the scraper. We also faced some unintentional bugs with the admin panel and the translation feature after the publication of the website, but we were able to quickly redress the problems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of building this website, especially since it is the very first one most of us have made. It was amazing to watch ourselves get past our procrastination and turn a rough concept into a fully functioning application. We are also proud that we created a working solution that could benefit the lives of so many local students, families, and even our own households by making important school district updates accessible to everyone.

Aven K. - Personally, I am extremely proud of creating the "Videos" and "Meeting" panels. The meeting panel was the first thing I worked on. It was very easy to set up the page, but its completion made the whole team happy and determined. Essentially, it deeply motivated us to work hard. On the other hand, the video panel was a complete pain. Setting up Apify's scraper was difficult and confusing, but hooking it up to EBOE-101 was its own challenge. It took me several hours just to get the video portion running, but then I also needed to fetch the transcripts of the 20 videos that were already posted. Luckily, Base44 was able to assist me in configuring the scraper to find both the videos and its respective transcripts. The feeling of pride and joy after overcoming this adversity was totally worth the hassle!

What we learned

This project was a massive learning experience for our team. Firstly, most of us learned how to build a website/app from scratch and how to use platforms such as Base44 and Apify to make it all work seamlessly. Beyond the technical skills, we learned a lot about how to work together better as a team, communicate our ideas effectively, and manage our time properly to avoid procrastinating when under pressure.

What's next for EBOE-101

We want to keep building EBOE-101 to make it a better tool for the Edison community. Moving forward, we want to set up a notification system that sends a text/ping directly to parents and residents who sign up, keeping them updated with deeper details on upcoming meetings. We also plan to add even more languages to make the app more inclusive. Finally, we also want to take our AI solution to the next level by having it analyze community feedback to generate potential solutions for the BOE, and possibly even introduce a feature where residents can vote on those ideas directly on the platform. Additionally, our website is currently "one-sided": the community is able to freely use this website, but the survey responses are not being set to the board members yet. We hope to present this website to the EBOE and demonstrate its importance in order for them to be "on board." In summary, we hope to strengthen the relation between the Edison community and its Board of Education!

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