2025-07-04

The Hackathon

This previous weekend, I was able to attend the ‘Humane Tech Hackathon’ hosted by Erika Anderson. The gist of the event was to create an application that used AI in a way that improved the lives of people in a meaningful way. What this meant in practice was focusing on an area where we can use the power of LLMs to summarize, re-contextualize, or improvise information that may or may not have been available to them before.

There were many participants from all walks, including people who had never coded before! In the end we formed a total of 11 teams. There were some amazing submissions, including a 911 first responder assistance portal, a personalized and interactive bedtime story app, and a student-teacher lesson plan assistance tool. Check out Erika’s blog about the event for more details.

Another fun facet of this hackathon is that it partnered with Toolhouse and WindSurf who graciously provided a free premium membership to their respective services for the hackathon.

By The People

[The] government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth
- Abraham Lincoln

The name of our team and our app comes from the famous quote from Abraham Lincoln during the Gettysburg Address. The problem we identified in our current political climate was that though the government was ‘by the people’, often times, the people did not know how they can affect public policy.

Our team consisted of myself and three other awesome people I met that day, Max Gaspers Scott, Gisela Kottmeier, and Amarpreet Kaur. Amarpreet came from the realm of policy politics where she was working at becoming a US diplomat, but decided to pivot to a more tech focused policy making role. She viewed this hackathon as a way to transition into the space and so came up with the idea behind our project.

The app was designed to simplify political engagement by allowing users to view current bills and issues being discussed, as well as contact their representatives. Additionally, it featured a chatbot powered by Toolhouse, which enabled users to ask questions about the bills to better understand the issues. The chatbot also helped draft scripts to persuade representatives in support of or against specific legislation. In doing so, we show how AI can improve political participation rather than extract engagement for profit.

I worked on creating the backend for the service, which was responsible for connecting the main frontend to the government APIs as well as instantiating the chatbot with the correct context. The backend was written in Flask and hosted on Sevalla.

Max worked in the Toolhouse dashboard to create the necassary chat functions and endpoints to power our AI features. This included writing out the system prompt templates and enabling the toolhouse chat interface to become accessible by the frontend.

Gisela worked on the frontend, making sure that the user was able to navigate the page with ease. React was used for the frontend along with tailwind for styling. The app was hosted on vercel.

Amarpreet was the main source of political knowledge for our application, giving us the insights and performing the research needed so that we were on the right track.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, we did not win the hackathon. This was due to possible feature creep and misunderstanding the capabilities of some of the tools we used. However, this was a great learning opportunity for all of us involved and I hope to take the lessons learned here to my future endevours.