PolicyLens

PolicyLens simplifies complex policies into clear, accessible insights using news scraping and analysis, empowering citizens to understand, engage with, and shape economic and civic decisions.

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Inspiration

Policies and budgets affect every aspect of our lives, yet most people can’t engage with them because of jargon and complexity. We wanted to bridge that gap and make civic and economic systems understandable to all.

What it does

PolicyLens scrapes news and policy sources, analyzes them, and presents simplified summaries with clear takeaways and real-world impacts. It transforms dense documents into accessible insights that empower communities to make informed decisions.

How we built it

We built a web platform powered by automated news scraping, natural language processing, and custom summarization pipelines. The backend fetches and organizes policy-related content, while the frontend presents it in a clean, user-friendly interface.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Handling inconsistent formats in scraped data.
  2. Making summaries both accurate and easy to understand. 3.Building an intuitive design under hackathon time constraints.
  3. Learning New Technologies.
  4. Understanding why this can be helpful

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Created a functional prototype that demystifies policies.

What we learned

  1. The importance of balancing accuracy with simplicity in policy communication.
  2. How technical design choices impact inclusivity and accessibility.
  3. New skills in integrating scraping, NLP, and front-end presentation quickly.

What's next for PolicyLens

  1. Adding multilingual support to reach wider communities.
  2. Expanding coverage beyond national policies to local governance.
  3. Integrating visualization tools for budget and policy impacts.
  4. Partnering with civic organizations to amplify real-world use.
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