Exhibit 04 · Built & Running
Canopy
I wanted one place that reads 193 governments' development record every morning. Nothing like it existed, so I made one — and it has run on its own ever since.
Why it exists
Tracking whether countries are actually implementing their Sustainable Development Goal commitments is a research problem most students and policy professionals can't practically solve — the data is scattered across UN agency reports, national government portals, and NGO databases, published in inconsistent formats and updated on incompatible schedules.
Canopy synthesizes that signal into daily AI-generated briefings: one digestible summary per country, per day, sourced from the policy record rather than news media. It's built for students, researchers, and policy professionals who need to track the implementation gap — not the announcement gap.
193 UN member states covered. The daily pipeline has run continuously since launch.
Canopy dashboard — country-level SDG tracking
193
Countries
Daily
Pipeline
17
SDG Goals
Observatory view
Homepage showcase
What it actually covers
The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals are the framework. Every country has signed onto them. What Canopy tracks is the distance between that signature and the policy record.
The daily briefing
Each morning, the pipeline reads the latest policy record for every UN member state and generates a briefing focused on SDG implementation — what commitments exist, what's happening on the ground, and where the gap is. One country, one summary, sourced from the policy record rather than news media. The goal is signal, not volume.
The Observatory
Rather than reading country by country, the Observatory lets you scan across regions, goals, and time. It's built for the question you can't easily answer from a news feed: which countries are actually moving on SDG 13 (climate action), which have stalled on SDG 4 (education), and where the rhetoric is running furthest ahead of the record.
The weekly deep dive
Once a week, a second pipeline runs a slower, more analytical pass across the week's data — picking up trend shifts, surfacing stories that didn't hit the daily threshold, and drawing cross-country comparisons on high-signal topics. It's the layer that turns a daily feed into something closer to a research tool.
Why "implementation gap" and not just "SDG news"
Most SDG coverage tracks announcements — pledges, summits, targets set. Canopy tracks what comes after: the legislation passed or shelved, the budget allocated or cut, the policy promised in 2015 and still unimplemented in 2026. The gap between a government's stated position and its actual record is usually where the story is.
The stack
Frontend
- React
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Vite
Backend
- Python
- FastAPI
- PostgreSQL
- Resend (email)
AI Layer
- Claude API
- Prompt caching
- Vision image checks
- Daily + weekly pipelines
Infrastructure
- Vercel (frontend)
- Render (API)
- GitHub Actions (pipelines)
- cron-job.org (keep-alive)
