About

RVA Contract Lens

Richmond's procurement contracts represent billions of dollars of taxpayer money — but until now, understanding them required navigating multiple government portals, downloading spreadsheets, and manually cross-referencing federal compliance lists. RVA Contract Lens changes that.

What It Does

RVA Contract Lens aggregates contract data from four sources — the City of Richmond, SAM.gov, Virginia eVA, and VITA — into a single searchable, filterable dashboard. Procurement staff can ask plain-English questions like “which contracts expire in the next 30 days?” and receive AI-generated risk recommendations, supplier concentration analysis, and automated compliance checks against federal exclusion lists.

For Richmond residents and journalists, the public transparency view makes it easy to see how the city spends money by department, vendor, and category — without needing any technical background. All data shown is sourced from public government datasets and is presented exactly as published. Nothing is modified or inferred without a clear disclosure.

Who It's For

Procurement Staff

  • Track expiring contracts before they lapse
  • Check vendors against all 7 required federal exclusion lists
  • Identify vendor concentration risk by department
  • AI-generated renewal recommendations and risk narratives
  • Extract key terms and dates from PDF solicitations

Richmond Residents

  • See how City money is spent by department and vendor
  • Search contracts by keyword or supplier name
  • Find city services and the contracts that support them
  • Accessible design — WCAG AA, screen reader compatible
  • Spanish language support

Data Sources

SourceCoverageRefresh
City of Richmond Open Data (Socrata)City contracts — active, expiring, expiredWeekly
SAM.gov / USASpending.govFederal contracts and exclusion (debarment) dataDaily via API
eVA — Virginia's eProcurement PortalVirginia state contracts and vendor dataOn ingest
VITA — Virginia IT AgencyStatewide IT contracts and technology agreementsOn ingest

All data is sourced from public government APIs and datasets. RVA Contract Lens is not an official City of Richmond product.

Technology

FrontendNext.js 14 (App Router), React 18, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui
BackendFastAPI (Python), DuckDB for in-process analytics, ChromaDB for vector search
AI FeaturesGroq (llama-3.3-70b) — decision engine, NL-to-SQL, risk narratives, PDF extraction
DataCity Socrata API, SAM.gov API, eVA, VITA — unified into a single DuckDB instance
HostingDocker Compose + Cloudflare Tunnel

Accessibility Commitment

RVA Contract Lens is built to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards. All interactive elements have visible focus indicators, color contrast ratios meet or exceed 4.5:1, and the interface is fully navigable by keyboard. Screen reader support is provided through semantic HTML and ARIA labels throughout. Spanish language support is available via the language toggle in the navigation bar.

Built for Hack for RVA 2026

This project was created during Hack for RVA 2026, Track 1: A Thriving City Hall. It is open source and welcomes contributions from the Richmond civic tech community.

View on GitHub