Project: SpicyRegs

A image from the 2025 hackathon

A platform that turns federal regulations and public comments into accessible, actionable insights.

🏠 Why This Matters

Our work unlocks public comment data from Regulations.gov and other federal portals, making complex regulatory information accessible to both technical and non-technical users. By creating tools that analyze and summarize this data, we are empowering citizens to engage meaningfully with policymaking processes.

📖 Our Story

On July 26, 2025, over 80 civic technologists, policy experts, and government staff came together to make federal regulations and public comments more transparent and actionable. In a single day, they built 13 open-source tools that combined technical innovation with real-world needs.

Building on Moravian University's Mirrulations project, which mirrors 27 million regulatory documents, the teams created tools for easy data access, AI-powered Q&A, data pipelines, and dashboards. SpicyRegs is a continuation of the hackathon to build a open, contributor-friendly platform for exploring and analyzing regulations.gov data, usable by both technical and non-technical users. Read more in our blog.

🌍 Geography / Reach

DMV-based with our platform aggregating nationwide federal regulatory data.

🤝 Community Partners

Our project collaborates with Moravian University and DataKindDC.

📇 Current Project Volunteer Contacts

Name Role & Focus Slack
Eugene Kim 🧩 Project Volunteer @Eugene Kim

👋 Come Join Us

Everyone is welcome no matter your skill level or background. We especially need help with:

  • Regulatory & Policy Expertise Understanding federal regulations, public comment processes, and domain-specific nuances.
  • Data Analysis Working with large regulatory datasets and identifying trends.
  • Machine Learning & NLP Implementing RAG workflows, semantic search, embeddings, and text analysis for public comments.
  • Backend Development Building APIs, ETL pipelines, and managing large-scale data with DuckDB, LanceDB, or SurrealDB.
  • Frontend Development Creating dashboards and interfaces with React or other web frameworks.
  • UX/UI Design Making complex regulatory data understandable and accessible to users.
  • Data Engineering Cleaning, transforming, and integrating 27M+ regulatory documents into usable formats.
  • Community Engagement Partnering with civic tech volunteers, government staff, and researchers to ground-truth tools and workflow.
💬 Slack (#spicyreg) 🧩 GitHub Repo