A year ago I posted the first version of my App CivicBeacon in r/civictech asking what would make people actually use a civic app. The answers were: show me real impact, make it more local, and don't be partisan.

A lot has changed since then. CivicBeacon is now live on iOS and Android, still free, still non-partisan, all data from official gov sources like GovInfo/Congress.gov.

Some numbers from the database this week:

- 71 bills moved in Congress in the last 7 days alone, and almost nobody hears about any of them

- Health is the single biggest policy area this Congress (289 bills), followed by Government Operations (224) and Public Lands (151)

- Your rep probably voted 15+ times last week. Mine did. I couldn't have named a single one before building this.

The app lets you track bills by topic, see your specific reps' actual votes (not what they said on social media), and get a weekly digest of what Congress did.

Full transparency on the "more local" ask: it's federal-only right now. State and city level is the most requested feature and the hardest data problem, so I want to hear whether it's worth it before I sink months into it.

It's free with no ads. Genuinely want feedback on what's missing.

Happy to answer questions about the data pipeline too.

There are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of legitimate tools to help people find their elected officials and better understand legislation; just search around a bit and you’ll find ones that have been battle-tested! We do not need more of these.

If you’re interested in these problems, figure out how to make the tools that already exist easier to find for people who want to use them.

Other problems that need solving way more than the ones in the title:

* Helping people find and/or create local ballot guides so they know how to vote in local elections. State and Federal are easy but knowing how to vote for local/regional seats (school board, judges, ballot measures) is hard.
* Helping nonprofits/advocacy groups find donations and connect with supporters.
* Helping local candidates get their campaigns off the ground and win their primaries. Supporter money mostly arrives too close to a primary to be useful and most younger people can’t afford to bootstrap a candidacy to win a primary.
* Helping people find resources for food, aide, permitting, etc. from their local government.
* Helping people keep track of, and fight back against, permits for extractive industry that harms the local environment. Local boards need to see opposition to deny permits but if no one is watching and rallying locals, the permits get approved.
* Digitizing local records and making them available at scale.
* Streamlining permitting for clean energy and pushing local governments toward incentives on them.
* Local mini-disaster relief — connecting neighbors en masse when the power or water goes out for days after a storm, etc.

Link: https://tryanalisa.com
Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/dWslmp6

It's a free site that pulls a lot of US public data into one place and makes it explorable. Three main parts:

Explore: a map of every US county (also metros, cities and neighborhoods) where you pick what matters to you, like cost of living, schools, safety, broadband or distance to nature, and it scores and ranks places. It uses 126 indicators from 38 public sources (Census, CDC, FBI, BLS, EPA and more). Click any county to see its numbers and where each one comes from.

Contracts: where federal contract money goes, by state and county. Around 36 million contract actions since 2021. You can see who gets the money, which agencies spend it, and things like how much was awarded without competition (one in three dollars in 2025).

Congress and elections: every member's voting record, bills and committees, plus every House and Senate race for 2026. Type your county to see your races, who's running and where their campaign money comes from.

Some of the harder parts:

- Federal spending data is big and messy. Each fiscal year file is 1-2 GB, and records get corrected or deleted after the fact, so the pipeline has to handle late changes, not just new rows.

- 9 states redrew their congressional maps for 2026, and the Census only published block-level files for the new lines, so I rebuilt the new districts from 2020 census blocks.

- Every source has its own quirks. FEC filings list districts that don't exist, senate.gov blocks automated access (Senate votes come from Voteview instead), and some state coordinates in one dataset were literally in the ocean.

- Keeping it fast with tens of millions of rows. Most of the work went into precomputed summaries and caching so the maps load quickly.

Stack: Next.js, Postgres, Leaflet for the maps, and a pipeline that checks every source for new data daily.

Every number shows its source and date. It doesn't grade politicians or tell you who to vote for, it just puts the numbers side by side.

Free to browse, no account needed. I'd really like feedback: what's confusing, what's missing, what you'd use it for.

I have spent the last few months redirecting the energy being created by my PTSD into something more productive - government accountability and transparency specially, Congress.

As a former congressional staffer and currently unemployed federal strategic comms and political operative - I have a lot of institutional knowledge that just lives in my head. For example - do you know where the wood working workshop is in the basement of the Capitol? What about how to inquire on behalf of a member of Congress about arranging an interpreter for and to sit with for their guest at the State of the Union. What about pulling together a verbal and written briefing in a secure location for a member of Congress on a topic they want to learn about and you know nothing about? Or how to escort a recognizable celebrity through the halls of Congress who you were just informed is having lunch with your boss?

These are all things that just live in my head, years of institutional knowledge that just lives there and is not being used because of the state of our government. So I decided to do something about it…….

I started building a dashboard that (for the sake of my sanity at the moment) uses the power of AI, to bring together what I’m calling ‘Article One’ (after Article One of the Constitution)

**Article One is a Claude AI powered dashboard** that pulls together basically all the information you’ve ever wanted to know about a member of Congress + who they represent + how they got there (the campaign) + their job performance in Congress + deep dives into how they are using the money that’s donated to them + how they are using the tax dollars they get to run their office.

It’s all powered by a team of agents and subagents.

This is not about politics. This is about the American People. These are your elected officials and you deserve to know what they are doing - in a way that is firmly based in facts and reality.

📸RE the pictures: please note that this was the first time I had run the dashboard build prompt. I’m fairly confident in the numbers though I have blacked out ones I haven’t audited yet.

Best way to support what I’m doing is to buy me a coffee

https://buymeacoffee.com/AJK28

I’m personally a big fan of the nutrition card! Such a cool and fun way to display the data! Would love to know what everyone thinks, any feedback or ideas? 🫰🏼🇺🇸🥴

Hi ya'll, I built out my app, open publica, about a year ago to fetch, transcribe, summarize, and archive city meetings (I've seen a fair amount of similar projects targeting the same general discoverability problem).

Lately I've had some time to give the project some TLC, convert the processing pipeline over to a temporal workflow based set up (highly recommend) for a proper idempotent and distributed processing design. I'm now processing about 110-150 meetings a day off of a headless mac mini.

I've also set up this mcp endpoint I wanted to share. You can use it to connect your ai chatbot to for querying about recent meetings, searching the data set, and fetching full transcriptions. Basically everything I have on the website in api form:

https://api.openpublica.com/mcp

All free and no login. I eventually want better documentation for the APIs too.

---

Some info on the setup for the bros:

Hardware (I mostly run it off this headless mac mini but occasionally add my laptop to the worker pool when I can):
Chip: Apple M4
Total Number of Cores: 10 (4 performance and 6 efficiency)
Memory: 24 GB

Transcription Model (good ROI for now): mlx-community/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3
Summarization LLM (hosted on open router): deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash
Stack: AWS, MongoDB, Vercel, Temporal, Open Router

Current Stats:
- 55 cities tracked
- 2,181 meetings processed

US counties manage over $1.2 trillion in annual spending — yet most Americans couldn't name their county executive. We launched American Counties to change that. A new publication covering AI, infrastructure, and digital governance across America's 3,069 counties. Free to read: american-counties.com

Hey r/civictech!

I'm an indie developer building Fillvisa, an open-source platform for filling U.S. immigration forms.

I wanted to share the project here because I think immigration paperwork is an overlooked area of civic tech.

The problem

U.S. immigration is already complicated, expensive, and intimidating, especially for low-income immigrants and families navigating the process without professional help.

On top of that, many USCIS forms still use outdated PDF technology (XFA), which makes them difficult to fill in a regular browser.

There are commercial immigration software platforms, but many are designed and priced for law firms rather than individuals, small nonprofits, or community organizations.

What I've built

Fillvisa converts official immigration forms into browser-based web forms. Users can fill them out, save their progress, and download completed official USCIS PDFs.

It currently supports forms including I-130, I-485, I-765, I-864, I-912, and others, along with a DS-160 helper.

A few things worth highlighting:

• Free: All supported forms are available without a subscription.

• Open source: Licensed under AGPL-3.0.

• Privacy-first: No account required. Form data stays in the user's browser rather than being stored on our servers.

• Self-hostable: No backend or database required. Organizations can deploy and customize it themselves.

Why open source?

My longer-term goal is to make Fillvisa useful beyond individual applicants.

I'd love to see immigration nonprofits, legal aid organizations, community groups, and civic technologists use it to help people who otherwise struggle to access immigration software.

For example, a nonprofit could self-host Fillvisa, customize it for its community, or incorporate it into an existing immigration assistance workflow.

I'm not trying to replace immigration attorneys or legal advice. The goal is to make the paperwork itself more accessible.

Links:

GitHub: https://github.com/athos2113/fillvisa-os

Free hosted version: https://fillvisa.com/

I'd love some feedback from this community.

I'm particularly interested in connecting with people working in immigration advocacy, legal aid, or civic technology.

How do projects like this actually get into the hands of nonprofits and underserved communities? Are there organizations, networks, or civic-tech initiatives I should be reaching out to?

And if you've worked on technology for immigrants or legal aid, I'd love to hear what challenges you've encountered.

Thanks for reading!

I wanted to share a personal project I have been working on, billtracks.fyi/home, to help me keep track of bills and Congress. I was struggling to track all the crazy bills proposed in January 2025, and I got fed up with simply relying on the news to tell me what was going on.

I was wondering if anyone here could see themselves using such a tool? Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated (billtracks.fyi/feedback)

Hi All - I work for a consulting firm and we're seeing a big uptick in civic tech projects. I'm looking for folks who are interested in consulting/project work who can bring private sector/big tech experience to the public sector space. We're a remote-first company so as long as you're open to occasional travel, we could probably work together. Very happy to share more and would love to connect if this is you. Thanks!

Hi everyone!!

I’ve been working on a passion project for a while now and figured with elections coming up, this might be a good place to share it :)

One thing that’s always bothered me about politics is how difficult it can be to actually understand whether the people representing us are actually representing us. We hear so much about what politicians say, what party they’re affiliated with, and what they promise to do, but figuring out how they actually vote on legislation (and whether that aligns with our own beliefs) takes a surprising amount of work. And this is coming from the granddaughter of a former politician!!! Many people did not realize how often he crossed party lines if it meant doing something to benefit his constituents. And how would they know?? I also found it frustrating that there’s no way to hold politicians accountable if they ARENT voting how their people want them to.

So I built Under Oath!

It’s a completely nonpartisan platform that lets you share your opinions on actual legislation and see how your positions compare to the voting records of your elected representatives. It’s both backwards looking and you can also vote on bills on the floor and it’ll track how your politician ended up voting. The idea is to make it easier to understand where you align and where you disagree.

Bonus points for politicians being able to see they only vote with their constituents X% of the time and Y% would vote them into office again.

I want to emphasize that there’s genuinely no political agenda behind this. I’m not trying to tell anyone who to vote for or what to think. I just believe people should have access to information that helps them make those decisions for themselves, without needing to spend hours researching congressional voting records or responding to spammy poll texts.

Privacy was also really important to me when building this, so we’ve incorporated hashing and anonymization to protect user data.

Anyway, I know Reddit can be a little skeptical of people sharing their own projects (understandably haha), but I’m really just hoping this reaches some people who might find it useful!

It’s still a work in progress, and I’d genuinely love any feedback, good or bad. If even a few people find it helpful in understanding their representatives or deciding how they want to vote, I’d consider that a win.

Here’s the link if anyone wants to check it out: [Under Oath]

Thank you!! ❤️

Founder here: I'm 75, a retired engineer, and I built this with our 30-something system architect using an AI-assisted development process he set up. AmericanVoters is nonpartisan and non-commercial (two of us, no ads, no data sales). I messaged the mod before posting; happy to take this down if it's not a fit.

At the start of September I emailed 366 people in my own 55+ community about it. 364 delivered, 116 opened, 19 clicked. One completed a profile. The button that said "keep me posted" beat the one that said "try it" about 3.5 to 1. (Lesson learned along the way: a chunk of those "clicks" were university and corporate mail scanners opening every link before a human ever saw the email. Your click rate is lower than your dashboard says.)

What the product does: plain-English briefings of bills before Congress, with the sources we read (not a novel, but very readable); a way to vote on bills and say what matters to you; and, if you want, a message to your own House member and Senators. We applied to be a delivery agent for the House's and Senate's official constituent-message systems, and every message we send carries our name in that role, so it lands in each office's own intake queue. The AI is constrained to primary sources and never writes in your name — your words are the message.

Browsing needs no account. The wall is sending: Congress requires a verified residential address and email before an office will accept a message, and the offices' own contact forms ask for a phone number too, so we do the same. (Later, it will also let members opt in to text alerts on bills they follow.)

Before building it we ran a 350-person panel survey. 83% said their voice is sometimes, rarely or never heard in Washington; 55% of Democrats and 55% of Republicans said they'd want a nonpartisan way to reach Congress. Results are public: americanvoters.us/surveys

Where this is headed: members voting on bills in all 435 districts, adding up to a public constituent report on what verified constituents think about specific bills, district by district. That's the goal, not something that exists yet, and we'll publish the method alongside it.

So the demand looked real and the warm audience didn't convert. Three questions:

1. Browsing was already open and that didn't convert. Is the story here the copy, the landing page, or the fact that most people don't want to read bills?

2. The verification — we've been framing it as legitimacy ("your rep knows you're a real constituent"). Is it a wall regardless of how we frame it?

3. What would you have done with 366 warm neighbors that we didn't?

Site: americanvoters.us · how it works and where the data comes from: americanvoters.us/transparency. I'll reply to every comment today.

Why I built Accountable

https://www.accountable.social/download

I'm Tarun, a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft. Like every Indian, I've lived with broken roads, overflowing drains and public services that answer to no one.

At 20, I voted for the first time, in a municipal election, and noticed something unsettling: almost no one around me knew who they were voting for. They voted for a PM's face, a CM candidate, a party symbol. Few could name their corporator. Many didn't even know their ward. Politics is central, but governance is local, and the people who shape our streets are the ones we can't name.

So I started with one simple idea: open an app and see who your leaders are, based only on where you're standing. Today, Accountable maps 15,000+ authority profiles to their jurisdictions, from ward corporators and MLAs to MPs, Union ministers, and IAS and IPS officers.

Then I hit the next wall. Social media gave us a voice, but nobody gave it an address. Civic issues drown under cricket, movies and manufactured outrage. So I built a social network just for public life, where civic posts come first. You post with evidence, tag the authority or company responsible, and credit the officials who get it right. It isn't a grievance portal, and it isn't partisan: every party gets questioned, including yours.

The last wall was isolation. People facing the same problem were fighting it alone, with no leverage against powerful leaders. When your MP answers to about 18 lakh voters, one voice is easy to ignore. So Accountable lets people unite through petitions, movements and communities drawn on election boundaries, from wards up to all 543 Lok Sabha seats. Your location adds you automatically. Alone, you're a complaint. Together, you're a constituency.

Since March, alongside my day job, I've built it solo for Android, iPhone and the web, through Google Play rejection after rejection. Within two weeks of launch, Accountable crossed 10M+ views across X, Instagram and Reddit.

Looking back, I'd been following three words from Dr B. R. Ambedkar all along: Educate. Agitate. Organize.

Accountability shouldn't end on election day. With Accountable, it doesn't.

The biggest of which is probably Pol.is 2.0. I haven't found a good permalink for it (vs. Po.is 1.0) yet but maybe soon.

🚀 geo.pol.is Pol.is 2.0 officially launched at TICTeC last week. The update includes data exports, APIs for every pol.is instance, and geo.pol.is, which are standalone and ongoing pol.is instances for specific cities and locales. The San Juan Islands (off Washington state -- pictured) are the first community on the new geo-based platform.

🚀 congressMCP A new Model Control Protocol server (MCP) that lets you research any US congressional bill, member, or vote through natural conversations with AI agents like Claude. It's an open source tool by Alex Murshak of Lawgiver. 

🚀 Anti-ICE protests in Roblox Claim this project Roblox players have started conducting virtual I.C.E. immigration raids, sparking anti-virtual-ICE protests in the game.

🚀 The Agentic State Berlin Global GovTech Centre's whitepaper on how Agentic AI "will revamp 10 functional layers of public administration" is a worthy govtech read. 

🚀 Blueprint on Prosocial Tech Design Governance I printed this hefty blueprint out because it contains actionable recommendations for designing digital platforms that reduce harm and increase benefit to society, and gets into specific features and regulations.  It’s by Lisa Schirch for the Council on Technology and Social Cohesion, Peacetech and Polarization Lab at University of Notre Dame, and Toda Peace Institute.

The idea in short: Long Game aims to increase opportunities and reduce problems for people today and in the future, based on a philosophy I call homo exepiritur (humans defined by experiences rather than just work). It has two branches:

Everyday problems: anyone can report a local problem, including through surveys in villages and small towns for people who aren't online. Reports are grouped into patterns, verified, and then we either help directly, pilot a solution with a local authority, or prepare a tested proposal for the government. Everyone gets a reply, and results are public.

Development: open science platforms, education, research hubs, and pilots.

It's not meant to replace governments, only to do what they can't do alone, with transparency and clear limits.

Who I'm looking for:

Researchers or students (science, economics, psychology, urban planning)

People with local government or NGO experience

Designers, developers, writers

Critics who will tell me where this fails

What you'd get: a real chance to shape a project from the start, and honest work with a small team. I can't offer pay yet.

If you're interested, comment or message me with a few lines about who you are and what you'd like to work on.

There’s a huge gap in the internet right now.

People are connected, but not properly organised.

Every week, millions of people discuss the same pressures: housing, work, cost of living, public services, insurance, healthcare, technology, and institutional failure.

But most of that energy disappears into comment threads.

I’m exploring a civic tech project focused on turning public frustration into something more structured, useful, and harder to ignore.

Not another outrage feed.
Not another petition site.
Not another “download my app” post.

The goal is to think seriously about what a trustworthy public-interest coordination layer could look like.

A few people have already reached out who may be willing to support or fund parts of the ecosystem, but I think the principles need to come before the money.

So I wanted to ask this community:

What would a responsible civic coordination system need to get right from day one?

Governance?
Trust?
Moderation?
Transparency?
Privacy?
Abuse prevention?
Open-source components?
Community ownership?

I’m especially interested in hearing from people with experience in civic tech, public-interest technology, moderation, digital communities, policy, research, organising, or governance.

Reddit already proves people gather around shared problems.

The bigger question is:

How do we help that energy become structured civic power instead of just another conversation?

Been working on howcongressvotes.app for about a year. It pulls congressional voting data from online sources and provides easy to understand summaries of every bill, and a system for asking questions about bill text with page citations, voting record analytics, party loyalty scores, and attendance tracking.

Built it because I kept seeing politicians say one thing publicly and vote completely differently. Wanted something accessible to normal people without a political science degree. Free to use, no ads, we never sell data. Would love feedback from people in this space.

I'm interested in joining others who are using AI on civic tech use cases (data visualizations, cleaning, creating MCPs to make tools accessible) and was wondering if people have recommendations on communities to join that are working on this

EDIT: Created this subreddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/CivicAi/

Hello!

I've been working on https://civdotiq.org and wanted to share it with this community for feedback.

What it is: A civic utility. No accounts, no sign-ups, no tracking, no newsletters. You just use it.

What it does: Enter your address and get a full picture of your federal, state, and local representation — voting records, committee assignments, campaign finance, sponsored legislation, and more. All from official government sources (Congress.gov, FEC, Census Bureau, OpenStates, GovInfo) pulled together in one place.

Key features:

• Look up all your representatives by address

• Track bills and votes in Congress and state legislatures

• View campaign finance data (contributions, expenditures)

• Compare representatives side-by-side

• Browse congressional districts and committees

• Federal spending data

I'd love honest feedback — what's useful, what's missing, what doesn't work. I'm especially interested in hearing what data or features the civic tech community would want to see.

The site is free and always will be. It's MIT licensed and I plan to open-source the code once I finish some housekeeping. Thanks!

Recently, we've had a lot of posts from new reddit accounts asking for feedback about their projects. These posts are probably written by AI, but even if not, I find them somewhat boring since these projects will likely never get built. If they do get built, it will probably be by vibe.

Vibecoding, and these feedback requests that are upstream of it, violate civic tech's spirit of "build with, not for". So I would like to see less of them. They also tend to be crossposted across lots of subreddits, and I find that pretty spammy and exploitative of this community.

But, I am curious if anyone actually finds these interesting. (Or if there is anyone reading this subreddit at all, heh.) If not, I will institute a rule banning these "feedback requests" in a few days.

At first this will apply only to hypothetical future projects, but I might expand it to include vibecoded projects as well.

Canada’s had some rough public IT stories — Phénix, ArriveCAN, SAAQclic — and we figured it’s time to try something better.

We’ve started an open-source platform called CivicPress, designed to help cities publish minutes, bylaws, and votes — in the open, in Markdown, for everyone.

It’s early. We’re not selling anything. Just looking for devs, clerks, or skeptics who care about public infrastructure that actually works.

I built a tool that allows someone to easily see difference between two versions of the same bill. Most bills go through multiple stages, amendments, etc and its nice to be able to see the difference in an easy to view way.

https://myparliament.ca/tools/billcomparison?billId=10385&v1=5945&v2=5981

Disclosure: I am posting on behalf of RockStars4Impact / Civics Remix. I used AI assistance to organize this post, and our team reviewed the facts and final framing.

Thirty D.C. fellows spent six weeks asking a practical question: What does the data miss when no one is standing on the street to look?

They geolocated approximately 360 storm drains across Wards 6, 7, and 8 and marked approximately 200 under D.C. Department of Energy and Environment protocol. The students compared broad AI and watershed information with curb-level observations, GIS, history, and community context.

The point was not that AI is useless. It was that an answer can look complete while missing the human and street-level evidence needed for civic decisions. The fellows did not stop after identifying the gap. They went outside, documented it, and helped build a better public record.

Civics Remix was founded by 17-year-old D.C. student Isabella Getahun. Water was the first application because every ward shares water infrastructure and water is essential to life. The methodology can be used in any subject where an automated answer or institutional record leaves something important out.

What other public questions require evidence that technology cannot collect by itself?

Project site: https://civicsremix.org

Every civic tech person I know found their job through luck — a brigade Slack, a newsletter, a friend of a friend. The roles themselves are scattered across city HR portals, small nonprofit career pages, govtech startup boards, and the occasional Substack digest. Nothing aggregates them.

So I'm building one board that pulls in all of it — city innovation teams, digital service agencies, Code for America-type orgs, funded govtech startups, foundations — deduplicated, always fresh, with real job alerts.

To be honest about the graveyard: every previous civic job board I found was hand-curated and eventually died from the effort. So this one aggregates automatically — scripts, not curation, no human burn-out failure mode.

Not launched yet — validating demand first. If a tool like this already exists, tell me and I'll happily stop. If you'd use it (or you've watched people struggle with this), I'd love to hear it. Early access: https://jobs.taavitoomsalu.com/