Mandari Insights is operated by a member of Commons & Code.
The civic tech project Mandari promotes transparency in local politics through its citizen portal, Mandari Insights. Political decision-making processes at local level are often hidden away in the administration’s outdated, cumbersome council information systems. Mandari Insights solves this problem by using existing OParl interfaces to retrieve open data from local authorities and present it on a modern, intuitive platform for civil society.
It offers the following features to embed political participation in everyday life:
- Semantic search and LLM summaries: Resolutions, proposals and votes can be searched in full text. Long documents written in difficult-to-understand administrative German are summarised in an accessible way using local OpenWeights language models.
- Geographical localisation: Motions and development plans can be visualised on an interactive map, allowing citizens to see immediately which political initiatives affect their immediate neighbourhood.
- Proactive notifications: Users can set up alerts for specific topics or keywords (e.g. ‘cycle path’, ‘school refurbishment’) and are notified as soon as these appear on the agenda in the committees.
- Accessibility and data protection: The system is designed to be used without barriers. It requires no registration for basic viewing functions, is 100% open source (AGPL-3.0) and hosts all data in compliance with the GDPR.
Classification as Best Practice#
Mandari Insights demonstrates how modern civic tech can bridge the gap between local government and civil society. Without independent platforms such as this, access to local government information is often effectively hampered by inadequate search functions and council information systems that require a government login.
Whilst OParl provides the data, it is platforms such as Mandari Insights that make it usable for citizens. By presenting complex administrative data in an accessible way, the project demonstrates how open-source projects can drastically lower the barriers to local participation.