A mirror for
NY government.
Spiegel is German for mirror.
Our platform, Civic Spiegel, holds a clear, undistorted, and nonpartisan reflection of NYC and NYS government back to the people it represents.
NYC and NYS lawmakers generate thousands of pages of legislation, transcripts, hearing minutes, and committee reports every month — spread across a dozen different portals, each with their own formats and search interfaces.
We scrape official sources daily, embed the text into a vector database, and surface the most relevant records when you ask a question. The LLM answers directly from retrieved official documents, with citations — no hallucination.
Features
Free to use, no account required.
Ask anything about NYC or NYS policy. The RAG engine retrieves relevant hearing transcripts, bills, and meeting records, then Llama 3.1 synthesizes a direct answer with citations.
Floating chat widget on every page. Multi-turn conversations with your profile context. Falls back to GPT-4o-mini when the document index has no matching content.
290+ elected officials across City Council, State Assembly, State Senate, US House, and US Senate — searchable by borough, district, party, committee, and caucus.
Interactive maps showing NYC council districts, borough boundaries, NYS legislative districts, and congressional districts. Look up your representatives by address.
Direct links to all public meeting calendars, hearing schedules, and Council livestreams — from City Council to NYS Senate, in one place.
Full public documentation of every source, API, scraper, pipeline step, and infrastructure decision powering the platform. Primary government records only.
Representatives We Cover (Legislative)
Every New Yorker is simultaneously represented at five levels of government.
Local laws, city budget, zoning, sanitation, parks
State legislation (lower chamber), education, labor, state budget
State legislation (upper chamber), confirmations, budget oversight
Federal laws, appropriations, constituent services
Federal legislation, treaties, cabinet confirmations
Purpose + Values
Behind every technical decision.
Every fact traces to an official government record — Legistar transcripts, NYS Open Legislation, House.gov, NYC Open Data. No aggregator bias, no paraphrased third-party summaries.
RAG retrieval is augmented with your query and location input, so results surface the policies that affect you — not just citywide headlines.
Our GitHub Actions workflows run every morning. The representative directory and legislative corpus are refreshed and ingested daily from official APIs — no stale data.
Legislation is dense. The AI layer translates long records and complex language into clear, actionable takeaways without losing the underlying facts or hallucinating false ones.
Start exploring
Ask about policies, find your representatives, or explore district boundaries — no account needed.