OpenGov
A government‑intelligence assistant that lets anyone ask a public‑records question in plain English and get a sourced answer back — built on Scale AI's Donovan platform in a single weekend.
The problem
Government documents are technically public and practically inaccessible. Bills, contracts, FOIA dumps, council minutes — all sitting on PDF mountains nobody has time to read. Local journalists spend days hunting for a single quote. Citizens give up. Watchdog groups burn out.
The information is there. The interface is broken.
The approach (the 48‑hour build)
Rather than build yet another RAG demo from scratch, the entire weekend was spent leaning on Scale AI's Donovan platform — a serious LLM stack already trained for government and defense use cases — and putting a usable interface on top of it.
- Donovan as the brain. Donovan handled the heavy lifting: ingesting public records, grounding answers in source documents, and returning citations rather than hallucinations.
- A chat surface anyone can use. A clean conversational UI so a journalist, a city council watcher, or a high‑school civics teacher can ask "what changed in this 200‑page budget?" and get a grounded answer with linked sources.
- Vibe‑coded, not engineered. The whole thing was built in plain‑English prompts — proof that a non‑engineer with strong product instincts can ship a defensible civic tool in 48 hours when the foundation models are good enough.
The result
- Awarded the Scale AI Prize for outstanding usage of the Donovan platform.
- Validated that a single‑person team can ship a credible civic‑tech tool in a weekend if the underlying LLM platform is solid.
- Published on Devpost with a demo that still serves as a reference for what good Donovan integrations look like.
- Became a regular talking point in the workshops about why "vibe coding on top of serious infrastructure" beats "building from scratch" for hackathons.
Press & coverage
What I'd do next
- Open it up to local newsrooms as a free tier — the people who already do public‑records work but lack the engineering bandwidth.
- Add per‑city instances pre‑loaded with that city's council minutes, contracts, and budgets so first‑time visitors get useful answers in one click.
- Plug in OpenAI's Operator so the assistant can actually file FOIA requests on a citizen's behalf, not just summarize what's already public.
- Partner with a civic‑tech non‑profit to keep it sustainably hosted and free for community organizers.
Building in civic tech or government?
Happy to compare notes, share the prompt setup, or run a workshop with your team.
Book 15 min