The Tree Grows a New Ring: Recomposing a Civic AI in Hours
· 8 min read
On recomposing a multi-repo civic AI system between two rounds of a municipal election
14 posts tagged with "RAG"
Retrieval-Augmented Generation topics
View All TagsThe Order of Things: When Neutrality Needs a Shuffle
· 6 min read
How a WhatsApp message revealed a systemic bias we didn't intend — and why open source made the fix possible in hours
The Well of Kvasir: When the RAG Pipeline Learned to Listen
· 9 min read
How a single email from a candidate revealed four distinct failures in four distinct layers — and why Separation of Concerns was the only way to fix them
Clean the Windshield: Enhancing RAG Without Upgrading the Engine
· 8 min read
Three near-zero-cost interventions that improved our civic RAG pipeline more than any model change could
The Conversation Loop: When Citizens Teach the AI What Matters
· 6 min read
How streaming, threads, and two small buttons turned a Q&A tool into a learning system
The RAG Adventure Begins: When Documents Learn to Speak
· 5 min read
How 60 social media screenshots became a searchable civic memory in one afternoon
36 Voices Out of 3,600: What One Percent Participation Teaches About Digital Democracy
· 6 min read
Between December 2025 and February 2026, we ran an experiment. We opened a participatory platform — audierne2026.fr — and invited the 3,600 inhabitants of Audierne-Esquibien to co-write a municipal programme. Anonymous forms, public discussions on GitHub, full traceability from submission to integration.
36 citizens contributed. That's roughly 1%.
The Impossible Sprint: Building Civic AI in 4 Weeks
· 5 min read
"It looks impossible - but it's a hackathon. Cheers!"
This is the story of OCapistaine, a civic transparency AI built during the Encode "Commit to Change" Hackathon. It's a story of blocked pipelines, strategic pivots, 4,000 municipal PDFs, and the belief that AI can help citizens understand their local democracy.
Spoiler: We shipped it. Barely.
Sprint Planning: Mistral Document AI RAG Prototype
· 5 min read
Sprint planning call between Johnny (@jnxmas) and Victor (@zcbtvag) to align on the Sunday midnight deadline. Key decision: pivot to Mistral Document AI + Batch + Agent for a rapid RAG prototype.
Call Goals
- Align on immediate priorities before Sunday midnight
- Decide RAG approach and OCR path
- Clarify repo/branch workflow and submodule handling
- Assign ownership for Mistral Document AI setup
- Coordinate API keys and cost management
Project Sync: Opik Progress & OCR Blockers
· 3 min read
Quick catch-up between Johnny (@jnxmas) and Victor (@zcbtvag) covering Opik integration progress and OCR pipeline challenges.
Summary
Johnny showcased recent progress on Opik prompt optimization. A new architecture is in place where prompts are no longer hardcoded but managed via an Opik Prompt Library. The "Charter Validation" prompt has already been optimized using this system.
A new mock-up feature can automatically generate contributions (even with violations) from existing meeting reports. The goal is to create a robust dataset to test and improve the validation agent. However, this auto-generation currently produces repetitive content - a challenge that will need addressing by identifying and aggregating duplicate contributions.