Can AI revive democracy? A former Amazon product manager created a tool to spark social engagement – GeekWire

Julien Clayton spent six years as an engineer working on submarine propulsion systems. He received an MBA from Harvard. He worked as a product manager at Amazon, building tools to help internal teams make sense of their data, before losing his job as part of the tech giant’s broader downsizing.

His next ambition: to use AI to put buttocks on seats at town meetings, in person and virtually.

Clayton is the founder of Next30Days, a web app and email digest designed to improve social engagement. It pulls agendas for upcoming meetings, translates them into plain English, and gives residents a clear way to show up and participate, from Seattle and Bellevue.

Motivation: Clayton said he was in the national news late last year, feeling frustrated and powerless, when he came up with the idea for the service.

Local government, he realized, is where people can make a difference. But the information needed to get involved is buried in dense agendas that can run dozens of pages or more, posted on city websites that even public-spirited citizens find it difficult to navigate.

“It feels like we’re constantly being fed information, but most of it doesn’t feel like it’s working,” Clayton explained during a recent interview and product demo at GeekWire.

The name comes from the question: What is one action you can take within the next 30 days to become more involved in your local government and active in your community?

How does this work: The automated pipeline pulls in agenda data from Legistar, a law enforcement management system used by Seattle, Bellevue and thousands of other cities across the country. AI summarizes what’s happening, why it’s important, and what citizens can do about it.

Users select their city and select topics they care about (such as housing, transportation, public safety, and schools) and receive a curated email digest twice a week.

Each event in the app includes a simple language summary, a link to view the meeting online, and a button to commit to participating in person or online. Clayton is building a social proof feature that will show how many neighbors have signed up for a particular meeting.

“Many people are afraid to represent themselves in the city council,” he said. “If you can get a group of 10 people to talk about something, you can have an impact.”

Technical details: Clayton used Claude’s Code and other AI tools to write a lot of code. The foreground is hosted in Vercel. User data is in Google’s Firestore, a choice he said was driven by security concerns, given that data often reflects users’ political interests.

The AI ​​processing pipeline operates in an automated n8n environment. Multiple layers check the output for accuracy: one step summarizes the agenda, a second compares the summary to the original document to verify details like dollar figures, and a third passes more. If confidence drops below a set threshold, the item is kicked to Clayton for manual review.

Out-of-pocket costs are minimal. Clayton has been rebooting the project until now.

How you got here: Clayton grew up in Houston and studied nuclear engineering at Texas A&M. After six years at General Dynamics Electric Boat in Connecticut, working on propulsion systems for the Navy’s submarines, he attended Harvard Business School.

He was trained at Amazon, returned full time as a senior manager of technology products, and was laid off along with thousands of others as part of the company’s downsizing.

He started Next30Days with a small friends-and-family test in February. Then he went to FedEx, printed about 30 flyers, and began sending them around downtown Seattle, South Lake Union, Capitol Hill and Belltown, attracting a core group of early adopters to the program.

Broad landscape: There are a growing number of services using AI to make local government more accessible, including Aware AI, Civic Sunlight, and Go Vocal (formerly CitizenLab), in some cases by providing AI-generated meeting summaries and other materials.

But Clayton said the idea isn’t just to send information, but to inspire action.

“There are tools that summarize meetings,” he said. “There’s nothing that tries to bridge that gap between giving people information and actually being seen.”

What’s next: If the momentum continues, Clayton is looking at Tacoma, Redmond and beyond. The Legistar API makes scaling straightforward, as many cities use the same system. For cities that do not have an API, they may remove publicly available data from city websites.

In the long term, he’s considering a low-cost subscription, about $1 to $2 a month, or a partnership with a municipality. But the main product, he said, should always be free. “I don’t think money should be an obstacle for people to join their government,” he said.

Thanks to Marcelo Calbucci for introducing us to Julien Clayton. Know of any interesting Pacific Northwest startups or projects GeekWire should profile? Email [email protected].