标签：#civictech

I spent Friday night staring at a mock municipal utility shutoff notice. The text was dense. The language was punitive. The deadline was buried in a block of legal code on page two. Generosity usually shows up as time or money, and that kind of giving matters. I think it can also look like removing friction. Millions of vulnerable and non-native speaking families receive legalistic notices, like eviction warnings, utility shutoffs, medical bills, or benefit discontinuances, written in adversarial legalese. The emotional and cognitive weight is massive. These notices are dense no matter who is reading them. I still read some of them twice, and most people meet one while already having a hard week. What I Built I directed the build of Charitas Clew . It is an open-source, zero-judgment paperwork engine for public notices. Charitas Clew ingests overwhelming institutional notices and uses Google AI to decompress the legal gravity into plain-language clarity. Instead of a generic chat interface, it outputs a strict Action Protocol: The Actual Meaning : Demystified in plain, dignified language. Key Dates and Timelines : Pinpoints critical statutory deadlines and grace periods. Simple Next Steps : 2 to 3 actionable, reassuring instructions. Personal Speaking Script : A first-person script the user can read out loud when calling or visiting a clerk, caseworker, or counselor. The whole protocol renders in six languages: English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Arabic, and French. A notice written in adversarial English comes back as plain language in the language spoken at that household's kitchen table. Charitas Clew joins the Clew Suite , my portfolio of civic tech tools focused on making complex systems more inspectable. Demo Live Production Instance: charitas-clew.web.app Firebase Hosting serves the frontend. Every AI call routes through the Express gateway on Cloud Run. Paste a notice or upload a photo of one, pick a language, and read the result. Code earlgreyhot1701D /

Eighty minutes into building with three people I had met that morning, I renamed the idea I brought with me. 21:05 Rename the product to Civiq and credit the team I wrote that commit message myself. By then the idea had four authors. Some context on the room. The Claude Impact Lab is part of Claude Community, the run of local events where people who use Claude get together in person. This one followed a Claude Conversation held earlier in Los Angeles, where people talked through what AI is doing to their jobs. The Impact Lab takes what came out of that conversation and turns it into a build day. You get the problem brief, you form a team, you have the day, you demo at the end. Travis Johnson, a Claude community ambassador, hosted with Evan Grenda at Intersections LA. Developers and non-developers both, and they meant it. What I brought was not a project. It was an idea and a spec for it. No code, nothing built, nothing running. The idea comes out of something that is true in most cities. Your city government publishes what it intends to do before it does it. Agendas go up ahead of the meeting, and any resident can read them, show up, and speak on an item before the vote. That right exists. Using it takes work, which is probably why every time I used it I would give up on what I was looking for. In Ventura it means 21 separate boards and commissions, each with its own page, posting PDFs that run long and read like they were written for the people already familiar with the subject matter. Because they were. So if you want to know whether anyone is voting on something a block from your house, you go looking, board by board, document by document. And you have to already know the words the city uses for the thing you would call a pothole. Agenda Watch was going to make all of that searchable in plain language, with every answer carrying a receipt back to the page it came from, so nobody has to take the tool's word for anything. In use that is a small thing. You ask a que