Three Bay Area students noticed a problem with the local government: a lack of understanding.
To combat this issue, they founded the solution: SimpleCity. Created by Los Altos High School seniors Samuel and Patrick Zhang and Aragon High School senior Ruiwen Ge, SimpleCity is a website that summarizes local government agendas in an easy, digestible format.
“When we were looking at local government agendas, they were really long and hard to read,” Ge said. “That’s why we decided to make it summarizable.”
Currently, SimpleCity summarizes government agendas from San Francisco, San Mateo County, Santa Clara County, Santa Barbara County and the Los Altos School District. To make government decisions readable, the website utilizes AI tools to extract agenda data and create clear, refined summaries.
Along with the summaries, the sources are linked below the recaps with a “summary confidence” bar for transparency. The website is also available in multiple languages, including English and Spanish options.
“One of our biggest goals is for people to realize that they can speak up and have a voice in their local community,” Ge said. “We can help them get rid of the friction that exists when there [are] really inaccessible local agendas.”
However, when first founding SimpleCity, Ge, Samuel and Patrick ran into some issues.
“We reached out to a lot of like government officials asking for their feedback and if they could support us in some ways,” Patrick said. “To be blunt, we didn’t get any responses from them. Obviously that was very demotivating.”
Instead, the three sought out different avenues for advice. They pivoted to online forums like Reddit and Nextdoor for suggestions and received tons of positive and encouraging feedback. Through these avenues, they gained additional ideas for expanding their website, such as an email subscription service.
Now, since launching, SimpleCity has garnered over 700 users.
“We received a lot of positive community reactions, and that feeling was good,” Patrick said. “People [were] supporting us and truly believing in what we are building.”
Currently, their biggest goals are to inform the public and encourage students to participate more in local government. In the future, they hope to expand the jurisdictions they cover and include more school boards, according to Samuel.
They also hope to minimize the price of maintenance to keep the tool accessible for everyone at no cost.
“Simple City can keep things transparent…[and] it gives people the straight facts,” Samuel said. “Government should be open to everybody. It shouldn’t be concentrated toward a certain group of people.”
