Public Projects

Connects AI assistants to six live Philadelphia city databases: 311 service requests, police crime incidents, L&I building permits and code violations, PPA parking tickets, and OPA property assessments. Also lets an AI search the OpenDataPhilly catalog to find and describe available city datasets — though it links to them rather than querying them directly. Built for researchers and analysts who want to ask structured questions of city data without writing SQL or navigating APIs.

For: Researchers, civic technologists, journalists, city staff

Connects AI assistants to Philadelphia's property assessment and tax balance data through the city's public CARTO API. Enables natural language queries over property records — supporting equity research, appeal preparation, and civic transparency. Built using the Model Context Protocol to allow LLM agents to query structured municipal datasets through a standardized interface.

For: Researchers, civic technologists, property owners

An interactive civic tool allowing users to adjust the allocations of Philadelphia's $6 billion General Fund and instantly see the trade-offs and real-world service impacts of their choices.

For: Residents, civic technologists, policymakers

A browser-based simulation for forecasting sales tax revenues using historical trends and economic assumptions. Students work through projection scenarios used in real municipal budget processes.

For: MPA students and instructors

An interactive exercise in analyzing multi-year budget data to identify spending trends, variance patterns, and fiscal pressures. Builds skills in reading and interpreting government financial reports.

For: MPA students and instructors

A hands-on exercise in building and managing a personnel budget — the largest cost driver in most public agencies. Covers position costing, salary scheduling, and benefits calculations.

For: MPA students and instructors

A simulation-based exercise exploring how a grant-dependent nonprofit can be financially healthy on paper while facing real cash crises mid-year. Students build a monthly cash flow model, calculate liquidity ratios, and stress-test the organization against delayed grant disbursements.

For: MPA students and instructors

A full-cycle capital budgeting exercise modeled on a major regional transit authority. Students build a 5-year Capital Improvement Plan, allocate funding across federal, state, and local sources, construct a 20-year bond amortization schedule, and assess the operating budget impact of debt service.

For: MPA students and instructors

A contractor selection exercise for the City of Northwood's Overlook Park revitalization. Students use present value analysis to compare three proposals with different upfront costs, maintenance streams, lump-sum renovations, and residual values — identifying the least-cost option over a 10-year horizon.

For: MPA students and instructors

A 20-slide interactive lesson on Tax Increment Financing for the Fels MPA curriculum. Students advance through case studies (Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia) and manipulate live simulations — an increment area chart and a debt service coverage model — to explore when TIF works, when it fails, and how to evaluate it responsibly.

For: MPA students and instructors

A curated, filterable library of prompts designed for government and nonprofit contexts — policy analysis, communications, data interpretation, and more. Sourced from student submissions and practitioner experience.

For: Government practitioners, MPA students