Hello!

We crossed 12 million pages last week. That's 12 million pages of civic meeting data—agendas, minutes, resolutions—from over 700 sites across every US state, Puerto Rico, and parts of Canada. All searchable, all free, all preserved in the public trust.

But pages are just pages. What matters is what you can do with them.

Introducing Public Topics

CivicObserver now has public topics: curated searches that track specific issues across every municipality in the CivicBand database. And given everything happening right now with privacy, surveillance, and immigration enforcement, we're launching with a topic that feels urgent.

Flock tracks every mention of Flock Safety, automated license plate readers, and related surveillance technology across all 12 million pages. It’s all here: City councils discussing contract renewals; Planning commissions hearing public comment about privacy concerns; Police departments presenting data to budget committees.

This is the kind of research that used to require filing dozens of public records requests and waiting months. Now it takes seconds.

Public topics are the beginning of what CivicObserver makes possible: not just searchable archives, but monitoring tools that let people track issues across jurisdictions. A journalist covering housing policy in three cities can watch all three at once. An activist monitoring police oversight doesn't have to check a dozen websites every morning. A parent following school funding debates can see what neighboring districts are doing. The data was always there—we're just making it usable.

More public topics are coming. If there's an issue you'd like to see tracked, let me know.

Under the hood

The infrastructure that makes this possible has been quietly evolving. I rebuilt the data pipeline so it can chew through documents much faster—which is how we went from 8 million to 12 million pages in a few months. The code that serves all 700+ sites got pulled into its own project. CivicObserver now powers the search, alerts, and public topics.

All of it is open source and BSD-licensed: Clerk for the pipeline, Corkboard for site hosting, CivicObserver for monitoring. Pull requests are welcome, and we're actively looking for developers and devops folks who want to build with us.

How you can help

Use CivicBand. Use CivicObserver. Share them with journalists covering your city, activists organizing in your community, neighbors who want to know what's happening at city hall.

We also need volunteers. People to help add new municipalities. People to test features and file bugs. People to spread the word. If you have time to give, reach out to hello@civic.band — there's absolutely something useful you can do.

If you're going to be at SCALE 23x in Pasadena this March, come find us. We got a Community Booth, I'll be there the whole weekend, and I'd love to show you what we're building.

Finally, if you want to support the project financially, CivicBand is fiscally sponsored by The Raft Foundation, and your tax-deductible donation keeps the servers running.

Thanks for reading, and for caring about this work.

Philip