Canberra | Civic Claude Workshop: Idea to Production-Ready Product
Claude Community AU x ProductTank Canberra present Build a civic app with Claude in 2 hours.
The 2026-27 ACT Budget is 13 documents, roughly 124,000 words and more than 500 tables.
In this hands-on session you'll turn one slice of it into a small web app that answers one real question for one real person, and you'll deploy it to a live URL before you leave.
You do not need to know how to code. You do not need to pay for anything. A free Claude account (desktop app downloaded) and a free GitHub account is the whole kit. If you have Pro or Max, even better.
What we'll do
We start by pulling apart Your ACT Budget, Personally, a working civic app built with Claude: the original one-paragraph prompt, how the data was structured, how every figure links back to its source, and how it ships as three static files with no build step.
Then you build your own. Pick from ten starter ideas, a cost of living calculator, a concessions finder, a promise tracker, an infrastructure timeline, or bring your own. No idea yet? That's fine and it's planned for, there's a guided path that helps you find one in ten minutes.
You'll work in pairs, with facilitators circulating. We finish with two-minute show and tells, everyone demoing from their own live URL.
Who it's for
Anyone from "I've opened Claude a few times" to "I build with it weekly". Product people, policy people, public servants, designers, students, and the merely curious. If you can follow a checklist, you can ship something today.
What you'll leave with
A deployed web app on your own GitHub, live on the internet
A repeatable method for turning any messy pile of documents into a working tool
The full workshop repo, yours to keep, extend and reuse
⚠️ Before you come: 15 minutes of pre-work
Please don't skip this. It ends with you seeing something you made, live on the internet. Everyone who skips it spends the first half hour catching up instead of building.
Everything you need is here:
👉 claudecommunity-au/cbr-budget-buddy-workshop
Open SETUP.md in that repo and follow it. Full step-by-step is in your confirmation email too.
Bring
A personal laptop and charger. Not a work laptop if yours is locked down. Not a tablet, iPad, or Chromebook.
The URL of the repo you made during pre-work
One rough idea. Half-baked is completely fine. None at all is also fine
On the day
5pm: Doors open, attendees arrive for networking and refreshments. Answer any pre-work questions.
5:30pm: Workshop starts.
7pm: Live demos by attendees
7:30pm: Q&A with Claude Community AU & ProductTank organizers
7:45pm: Wrap-up and close
A note for public servants: everything we use is published public data from treasury.act.gov.au, the same material as a media release. Nothing confidential goes anywhere near this.
Co-hosted by Claude Community Australia x ProductTank Canberra.
Refreshments sponsored by Avian.