Can AI revive democracy? Former Amazon product manager builds tool to spark civic engagement

Julien Clayton spent six years as an engineer working on propulsion systems for submarines. He got 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 cutbacks.

His next ambition: using AI to put butts in seats at city meetings, in-person and virtually.

Clayton is the founder of Next30Days, a web app and email digest designed to boost civic engagement. It pulls upcoming meeting agendas, translates them into plain English, and gives residents a clear path to show up and participate, starting in Seattle and Bellevue.

The inspiration: Clayton said he was doom-scrolling 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 actually make a difference. But the information needed to engage is buried in dense agendas that can run for dozens of pages or more, posted on city websites that even civic-minded residents struggle to navigate.

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

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

How it works: An automated pipeline pulls agenda data from Legistar, the legislative management system used by Seattle, Bellevue and thousands of other cities nationwide. AI summarizes what’s happening, why it matters, and what residents can do about it. 

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

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

“A lot of people are afraid to show up to city council by themselves,” he said. “If you can get a group of 10 people showing up to speak on something, you really can make an impact.”

Technical details: Clayton used Claude Code and other AI tools to write much of the code. The front end is hosted on Vercel. User data is in Google’s Firestore, a choice he said was driven by security concerns, given that the data generally indicates users’ political interests.

The AI curation pipeline runs on the n8n automation platform. Multiple layers check the output for accuracy: one step summarizes the agenda, a second compares the summary against the original document to verify details like dollar figures, and a third does an additional pass. If confidence falls below a set threshold, the item gets kicked to Clayton for manual review.

The out-of-pocket costs are minimal. Clayton has been bootstrapping the project so far.

How he 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 Navy submarines, he went to Harvard Business School.

He interned at Amazon, returned full-time as a senior technical product manager, and was laid off along with thousands of others as part of the company’s workforce reductions.

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

Broader 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 offering AI-generated meeting summaries and other materials.

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

“There are tools that summarize meetings,” he said. “Nothing really tries to bridge that gap between giving people the information and actually getting them to show up.”

What’s next: If momentum continues, Clayton is eyeing Tacoma, Redmond and beyond. The Legistar API makes scaling straightforward, since so many cities use the same system. For cities that don’t have the API, he could scrape publicly available data from city websites.

Long-term, he’s considering a low-cost subscription, possibly $1 to $2 a month, or partnerships with municipalities. But the core product, he said, should always be free. “I don’t think money should ever be a barrier to people getting involved in their government,” he said.

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