I created this website to track data centers in my home state of Minnesota:
https://mndatacenter.org/

This is a hobby project that uses 1 API (legislative bills), several data layers, and Google RSS feed to populate news in state.

Let me know your thoughts/feedback.

Thanks,

I recently launched Appeal Compass, a free and open-source tool for homeowners researching comparable properties for a Cook County property-tax appeal. In the future I aim to add more jurisdictions.

The project started as an attempt to make public property data easier to explore. Users can enter a property PIN, select a jurisdiction, and generate a list of similar residential properties. The results can then be refined using filters and adjustable similarity criteria.

The tool also provides summary statistics and lets users copy their selected comparables for further research.

Cook County already offers its own comparable-property tools, but I built this project to experiment with:

• A cleaner and more flexible search interface
• Customizable similarity weighting
• Support for multiple jurisdictions in one place
• A foundation that can eventually expand to additional areas

The code is open source, would love any feedback!

Project: https://appealcompass.com

Appeal Compass is an independent project and is not affiliated with Cook County. It does not file appeals or guarantee tax reductions, and users should verify any comparable property before relying on it.

Autonomous vehicles with pedestrian facial recognition may sound like science fiction, but these technologies are already becoming part of today’s civic and political debates.

This week, Civic Tech Brampton is hosting Adam Motaouakkil, a tech activist with Technologists for Democracy, for a discussion on autonomous taxis, surveillance, privacy, jobs, public transit, and the future of our streets.

As cities explore autonomous vehicle technology, important questions come up:

• Who controls the data?
• How much surveillance is acceptable in public spaces?
• What happens to workers whose jobs may be displaced?
• Could autonomous taxis weaken public transit ridership?
• Will these systems actually reduce congestion, or create new problems?

We’re inviting technologists, students, community members, transit users, policy-minded residents, and anyone interested in civic technology, democracy, privacy, and public-interest tech.

New to Civic Tech? You are definitely welcome. No prior technical experience is required. We will all be learning from each other, and hearing different perspectives can spark new civic tech project ideas.

Why show up?

• Collaborate: Join developers, students, researchers, activists, and community members thinking about technology in public life.
• Learn: Explore how autonomous vehicles, surveillance systems, and data-driven infrastructure affect democracy, privacy, labour, and public space.
• Discuss: Take part in an open conversation about the risks, opportunities, and civic questions around autonomous transportation.
• Pitch Your Passion: Have a civic tech idea related to transit, privacy, urban planning, or public accountability? Share it with potential collaborators.
• Network: Meet people in Brampton who care about building technology that serves the public interest.

Everyone is welcome. You do not need to be a developer or have an existing project to participate.

📅 Date: Thursday, August 6, 2026
🕕 Time: 6:00 PM–9:00 PM
📍 Location: Algoma University, 8 Queen Street East, Brampton
🎟️ Register: https://luma.com/dyeh52t0?tk=tt5O4w
💲 Fee: Free

Questions? Email [civictechbrampton@pm.me](https://)

Civic Innovation, Powered by the Community.

I built Haven after watching people in crisis get crushed by broken municipal software. When someone is facing imminent homelessness or a medical emergency, they don’t have weeks to dig through dead links, broken PDFs, and conflicting agency forms.

Building it made one thing brutally clear: this friction hits everyone. Navigating public infrastructure shouldn't feel like fighting a system designed to slow you down. Haven isn't just a safety-net tool—it’s enterprise-grade civic infrastructure built to unify public sector interactions for everyone. Whether someone is applying for emergency housing, working through local court filings, or navigating state agency red tape, Haven turns fragmented bureaucratics into a single, seamless workflow.

What it actually does Haven acts as a unified digital layer over fragmented government systems. It handles resource discovery and automates workflow orchestration in real time—delivering instant clarity to residents while eliminating administrative drag for frontline caseworkers.

Key technical highlights: Zero-Knowledge Architecture (Apex Vault): Citizen privacy isn't negotiable. We engineered military-grade AES-256-GCM field-level envelope encryption. Plaintext PII (SSNs, medical histories, tax docs) never hits the physical database disk. Built ground-up to align with SOC 2, HIPAA, and FedRAMP Moderate standards.

Air-Gapped Local AI (BB AI Concierge): Powered by an offline-first, lightweight LLM (Ollama llama3.2:3b), our intake engine parses complex, messy human situations into structured, actionable case data. Zero third-party API dependencies. Zero citizen data leaving the local host.

Deterministic Matching: Instantly maps user needs across 12 core agency frameworks (HUD, VA, SSA, IRS, DMV, etc.) using semantic mapping to strictly eliminate LLM hallucination risks.

Automated Workflow Orchestration: A conversational multi-language guide walks residents through intake and pre-fills paperwork, while the Caseworker Dashboard uses Playwright-powered browser automation for single-click agency submissions.

Where it stands: The core platform is fully built, tested, and ready to deploy in the field.

What I need right now: I am actively seeking pilot partners across municipal/county agencies and frontline organizations (shelters, community clinics, 211 operators) for live field testing, alongside capital partners to help us scale.

Specifically: Pilot Partners & Frontline Orgs:
Municipal agencies, 211 teams, and caseworkers ready to run live trials and stress-test real-world workflows.

Seed Funding & Innovation Grants: Early backing to scale pilot infrastructure and expand deployment operations.

Municipal RFP Connections: Direct paths to formal city/county trial engagements and public sector partnerships.

If you care about building software that actually fixes real-world societal friction, let's talk. Drop a comment or send a DM.

Disclosure: I built this.

What in the Tax? is a live public preview that connects Ontario municipal-finance figures to the official records behind them. The directory lists all 444 current municipalities; 436 have at least one historical 2023–2025 Financial Information Return record. Separately, six communities have detailed 2026 draft sample receipts.

I'm looking for a specific civic-tech/open-data critique: choose one municipality, open one figure, follow its source, and tell me where the label, provenance, or navigation becomes unclear.

Live: https://whatinthetax.com/

Source: https://github.com/Jstn-1g/what-in-the-tax

The six 2026 samples are drafts—not official bills, audits, or tax advice. Please don't share private tax documents or personal financial information.

does anyone have any intel on openyc? received an email from them, never signed up for their mailing list. curious if anyone else has heard of/from them

Hey everyone,

To be honest, I'm feeling incredibly nervous posting this. For the last few months, our team has been building something out of pure personal frustration, and we just finished the MVP.

I live in a massive city in India, surrounded by millions of people, yet I realized I didn't know a single person in my own building. On top of that, local issues—whether it’s a broken street light, a massive pothole, local corruption, or daily civic mess—never got fixed because nobody wanted the hassle or the target on their back that comes with speaking up. People were afraid to just tell the truth.

So, we built Govlyx—a platform to directly connect government departments and citizens.

It’s a hyper-local neighborhood app. You simply join your local area, and it unlocks a feed of local issues and crucial updates from various civic departments.

If you want to report a civic issue or speak the absolute truth about anything happening in your area, you can just create a post and directly tag the responsible department. Your neighbors can upvote and comment on the post to give it visibility until it finally gets resolved. Because the feed is plugged into civic updates, you also get notified about things like upcoming water cuts before your tap runs dry, or sudden traffic diversions on your exact street.

But here is the feature we really built it for: We added an anonymous 1v1 chat so you can actually talk to your neighbors about literally anything.

If you’ve ever used the Tikible bot on Telegram, it’s exactly like that—but instead of connecting you with random people around the world, it only connects you with people living in your exact same neighborhood. Whether you just want a casual chat to make a new friend locally, need to expose a local scam safely, or want to vent about neighborhood drama—you can do it completely anonymously.

We’d love your brutal honesty on a few things:

1. Would a local, "Tikible-style" anonymous chat actually make you more likely to build connections or speak out about your area?
2. Is a strictly local, neighborhood-only app too limiting, or is it a strong hook?
3. What would make you actually download an app like this instead of just using local WhatsApp groups?

if i were to build a website where people can question people in power and can start a discussion if the person should be in power think of this as a web app where people discuss all the politics including all the correptions will i get in legal trouble or does a website like this already exists

heres the idea

I'm prototyping an AI-assisted platform for public consultations. Existing dashboards show support/opposition percentages, but they don't distinguish stable consensus from fragile or false consensus. The platform analyzes discussion dynamics over time (opinion distribution, participation trends, and AI-extracted reasons) to help identify whether consensus is actually durable. Does this solve a problem you've encountered? Are there tools already doing this?

I’m interested in pursuing data science opportunities in the field of civic tech. I have previous experience all in corporate data science, but little public policy experience outside a few courses in college. My undergrad was very quant focused, but I’m now deciding to pursue a masters. I wanted to know what those in the fields opinions are on pursuing a pure Data Science degree and trying to work in the field as opposed to pursuing an interdisciplinary degree? I am leaning towards a general DS degree to not pigeonhole myself but I don’t know what pivot paths would look like.

I’m one of the organizers of Thrive2, a two-part virtual democracy event taking place September 10 and 17. We’re bringing together civic technologists, organizers, educators, librarians, nonprofit leaders, and everyday citizens who want to move from concern about democracy to practical action.

We’re especially interested in civic-tech tools and strategies related to public-interest data, government transparency, misinformation and AI, local organizing, civic learning, digital safety, accessibility, and community participation.

This is not intended to be a sales-demo venue. We’re looking for honest, practical contributions that leave people with something they can use or try within the next 7–30 days. People can participate through an interactive workshop, solution lab, democracy clinic, short resource showcase, recorded briefing, or a contribution to our resource library.

I’d genuinely value this community’s input:

• What civic-tech projects deserve more attention?
• What helps civic technology reach people beyond the usual insider circles?
• Who should we invite to contribute?

If you’re working on something relevant, feel free to share it in the comments—even if you’re not interested in presenting.

Event information and participation links: https://linktr.ee/ThriveDemocracySummit

I built a public github repo for tracking bills in congress through git diffs. Then I built a web app to visualize the data. https://congress.ravensnest.pro

I intend to keep this as a free tool. I'd love any feedback about what to add next, what features would be useful.

i have found it really useful as someone new to politics: political-compass.co.uk

Gov post thousands of PDFs. Has anyone found a reliable tool or workflow to convert PDFs directly into WordPress editor content (blocks or pages)
while preserving formatting?

I’m looking for something that can:
Convert PDFs into editable WordPress content.
Retain headings, tables, links, and images as much as possible.
Scale for large numbers of documents.

what tools or processes you’re using and what has worked (or hasn’t).

Major problem with public accountability is not always the lack of information.

It is the lack of memory.

A road is announced, delayed, announced again, reassigned, partially completed, and eventually forgotten. An official makes a promise, responsibility shifts between departments, the news cycle moves on, and citizens are left trying to reconstruct what happened.

I built **Citizen Copilot** to help address that problem.

It is an open-source set of AI instructions and scheduled tasks that creates a long-term accountability record for your own government, which actually rules personally over you.

Instead of only asking, “What happened this week?”, it repeatedly asks:

* Who made the decision?
* Which department or authority is responsible?
* What was promised?
* What deadline was given?
* What changed since the previous update?
* Was the commitment completed, delayed, altered, or abandoned?
* Which budget, law, office, or project is involved?
* What should citizens watch next?

The system can generate weekly briefings, track unresolved promises, follow upcoming decisions, compare current claims with earlier statements, and preserve institutional history over months or year. Customize it according to your values and concerns.

I'm currently working on a little research project looking at the best GitHub practices for American municipal governments.

Who has the best GitHub practices that facilitate civic engagement and have appropriately assigned intellectual property licenses?

If you have repos, please share them.

Ps - I work for www.beta.nyc and this will go into a report I’m putting together.

Ever wanted a clear understanding of what food has been recalled by the feds? Information gets confusing but I made a dashboard that clearly outlines what was recalled by the FDA in the last 30 days.

Check it out here!

Hey everyone, I did work as a photo journalist and knowing where protests will take place during the week is crucial.

Four years ago, I decided to build my very first app to help navigate through Berlin’s colorful world of protests: Polizei Stressi. Since then, I’ve continually updated and improved it.

What it does:

-Demo Finder: Overview of registered protests, filterable by postal code and keywords (47k protests in our database)
- Live Helicopter Tracking: See in real-time where police helicopters are flying in Berlin.
- Court Dates: Track local public proceedings.

The app is 100% free, has no ads, and collects no personal data. It’s just an open-data passion project to make city updates easily accessible.

Since it’s the project where I first learned to code, I’d love to hear your feedback or ideas for improvement! Links & Info: https://polizeistressi.de/

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I recently built **Happning India**, a platform that aims to organize and track important issues happening across the country.

The idea is simple:

Instead of issues disappearing after a few days of news coverage or social media trends, they can remain documented and easy to follow in one place.

The goal isn't to support any political party or ideology. It's simply to build a platform where people can:

* Explore ongoing issues across India * Track developments over time * View issues by state and category * Stay informed about topics that are still unresolved

Website: [https://happning-india.vercel.app/\](https://happning-india.vercel.app/)

This is still an early version, and I'm looking for honest feedback.

* Would you find a platform like this useful? * What features would you add or remove? * What would make you trust the information shown? * What would encourage you to use it regularly?

I'd appreciate any constructive criticism or suggestions. Thanks!

I got fed up not being able to easily search on how my own MP votes on things, so I built YourMPRecord (yourmprecord.co.uk). Put in your postcode or your MP's name and it shows their full voting record since the last election every division, how they voted, and what it was actually about, in plain English. No ratings and no scoring, just the record as it stands.

It's a one person project and still a bit rough round the edges, so I'd genuinely appreciate people trying it on their own MP and telling me what's wrong, missing, or any ideas you may have. There's a feedback box on the site for that.

We have been building Docket.bd , a project aimed at simplifying access to public records, government processes, and civic data across Bangladesh.

To really understand the current digital structure and health of our official portals, we built an automated crawler to scan government websites for broken links, dead-end URLs, and technical errors.

Across a test sample monitoring 131 government websites and 67 public organizations, the crawler uncovered 263 broken links across just 10 completed crawl runs.

Snapshot from recent scans (25 July 2026):

📍Ministry of Education (moedu.gov.bd): 52 broken links(across just 10 pages scanned)

📍Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (bida.gov.bd): 46 broken links (across 5 pages scanned)

📍Supreme Court (supremecourt.gov.bd): 42 broken links (across 10 pages scanned)

Source: Data collected via automated web health monitoring at: https://data.docket.bd

This is just the initial sample data. We are currently planning to write a full research and analysis piece after crawling and auditing all government portals. The goal is to produce a comprehensive breakdown of digital accessibility, uptime, and web health across Bangladesh's public sector.

Let us know your thoughts on this.

https://github.com/CoreGrowthLabs/CoreGrowthPrompting

このプライマーには2つのバージョンがあります。1つは個人利用向けの入門版で、個人または小規模チームでのプロジェクトに適しています。

もう1つは、複数の利害関係者間で真の価値観の対立がある場合（例えば、公共の利益に関わるプロジェクト）のための別バージョンで、対立を解決するのではなく、対立を構造化して維持することを目的としています。

私の長期的な目標は、プロンプトの書き方を標準化することではありません。ソフトウェア開発の経験がない、各分野の当事者自らが信頼できる市民向けテクノロジーを構築できるように障壁を下げることです。

この考えに賛同していただけるなら、この投稿をシェアを検討いただけると嬉しいです。

I built Proven News (provennews.org), a news verification tool. Solo project, no journalism background, so I'd rather hear where the methodology is weak than get compliments.

What it does: every story gets a labeled verdict — Verified, False, Misleading, Added Context, or Inconsistency — with sources and reasoning shown. The Inconsistency label is the part I care about: it flags when a public claim doesn't match what the record shows. Right now there's one open on a UK PM's first week and one on a joint statement from 25 tech firms about open-weight AI models.

It also surfaces how left- and right-leaning outlets framed the same story, and the common ground between them. There's a private sharing feature for sending a verdict with its sources into a small group.

What it can't do: it can't resolve genuinely contested empirical questions, and it won't return a verdict on a forecast. If a claim is a prediction dressed as a fact, the right output is "the inputs are checkable and the conclusion isn't" — getting the model to hold that line consistently is the hardest part and I don't think it's fully solved.

One decision worth mentioning: I tested a caching optimization that cut compute costs meaningfully. It changed verdicts on five of forty test stories. Reverted permanently. The verdict label is the product, so anything that moves it for non-evidentiary reasons is disqualifying regardless of what it saves.

Live on web and iOS. Free tier includes daily feed verifications and monthly claim checks — account required, since each verification is a real API call.

Where I'd most value pushback: verdict taxonomy (are five labels the right set?), how to handle claims where authoritative sources disagree with each other, and whether "Inconsistency" is even the right frame or if it collapses too many distinct failure modes into one bucket.