Context
The setup before I touched it.
Indonesian public discourse around policy is loud but shallow. A new tax rule, a fuel subsidy change, a minimum wage debate - it shows up as a headline, a viral post, a 30-second TikTok. The boring middle (who actually pays, what the second-order effects are, what comparable countries did) gets skipped. Citizens form opinions on vibes; researchers waste hours framing before they get to thinking.
How it came together
Step by step - expand any phase for the highlights.
- Pulled recurring policy debate patterns
- Identified the missing 'boring middle'
- Catalogued local context gaps in English tools
Problem → Approach → Result
The short version, for the broad audience.
Problem
- 01Policy debate is dominated by opinion and identity, not structured trade-off analysis.
- 02Citizens have no accessible tool to stress-test the claims being made about policies that directly affect them.
- 03Researchers and journalists spend the first half of every project on framing - mapping stakeholders, listing trade-offs, finding precedent - before the actual analysis begins.
- 04Indonesian-language policy tools barely exist; everything assumes English and Western context.
Approach
- 01Built a focused workspace where any policy question becomes a structured brief - stakeholders, costs, beneficiaries, risks.
- 02Used AI to surface trade-offs, comparable cases from other countries, and steelmanned counter-arguments the user hadn't considered.
- 03Kept the human firmly in the loop: every output is editable, sourced, and challengeable - the tool drafts, the human decides.
- 04Indonesian-first by design: tone, examples, references, and historical precedent all rooted in local context, not translated from English.
Result
- 01What used to take a researcher half a day (mapping stakeholders, finding comparable cases) now takes 10 minutes.
- 02Conversations move from 'I feel this is unfair' to 'here's who pays, here's who benefits, here's the trade-off' - which is a much more productive argument.
- 03A repeatable structure for thinking about new policies as they emerge, instead of reinventing the analytical frame every time.
- 04Used as a personal sandbox by policy-curious citizens, not just professionals - which was the point.
Role
Built and maintained as a side project - product, design, and prompt engineering.
Status
Live - internal
React
Tap if this resonated.
What do you think?
Leave a comment or ping me — any feedback, thoughts, or collab ideas, I'll really appreciate it. Building alone is no fun.