The Problem: 95% of legislation goes unnoticed because raw legal texts are unreadable. Media coverage is optimized for outrage, not insight.
The Solution. I built a digital public infrastructure that:
1. Ingests & Sterilizes: Parses raw bills (PDF/XML) from US & PL APIs. Uses LLMs (Vertex AI, temp=0, strict JSON) to strip political spin.
2. Civic Algorithm: The main feed isn't sorted by an editorial board. It's sorted by user votes ("Shadow Parliament"). What the community cares about rises to the top.
3. Civic Projects: An incubator for citizen legislation. Users submit drafts (like our Human Preservation Act), which are vetted by AI scoring and displayed with visual parity alongside government bills.
Tech Stack:
Frontend: Flutter (Web & Mobile Monorepo),
Backend: Firebase + Google Cloud Run,
AI: Vertex AI (Gemini 2.5 Flash),
License: PolyForm Noncommercial — source is available for inspection, learning, and non-commercial civic use. Commercial use would require a separate agreement.
I am looking for contributors. I have the US and Poland live. EU, UK, FR, DE in pipeline, partially available. I need help building Data Adapters for other parliaments (the core logic is country-agnostic). If you want to help audit the code or add a country, check the repo. The goal is to complete the database as much as possible with current funding.
Live App: https://lustra.news
- Funny story:
- Friend of mine is Albanian
- Albania wants to join the European Union
- They are required to ensure that their laws don't have "internal conflicts" e.g. one law says something is legal, a different law says it's illegal
- Reviewing by hand would take a lot of work
- Friend uses an LLM to analyze the Albanian laws and find any of these conflicts
Apparently it worked out pretty well
- How do you handle innate LLM biases? I forget which model, but when asked to edit pro Zionist vs pro Palestinian content it showed heavy bias in one direction.
LLMs let you cover more ground but the fundamental problem of “who to trust” still remains. I don’t see how one can ever be used to strip political spin. It’s baked in.
- Very cool. Instead of MPs I think you might want to say "Representatives" etc. How to fill out the rest of the data too? Anyway, just wanted to +1. And it's cool you're building in an open way.
- How do you handle hallucination or omission risks when summarizing long bills with LLMs? Is there any automated diffing or traceability back to specific sections of the source text?
- Blocked by my corpo firewall for some reason.
- Getting "An error occurred" trying to vote for one of thr Civic Projects.
- Is there an LLM out there that makes people actually read. The information is publicly available since basically forever
Couldn't even pay people to read this literally
I think there needs to be like a military style debate globally on education levels it's that bad like actually that bad yeah
Here in Chicago
I'm dealing with probably a solid 70% of adults who don't know how to read correctly try fitting that into the LLM experience I don't know
- (Temporary comment: I took "source available" out of the title because I think it's a bit distracting there, but I've invited Jacek to add something about this to the main text.)
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