8 Million Pages, 600 sites, and counting
It has been way too long since our last update; I’m pretty sure I’ve added at least 5 million pages since December 2024. Here’s what we’ve been up to:
Added municipalities from every state in the Union, plus Puerto Rico
Rebuilt the pipeline at least twice, allowing me to split out the pipeline code into a plugin-based system and open-source that into clerk
Pulled the website hosting code into corkboard, so folks can see how I’m serving so many sites on just a few servers
Started a task tracker, so folks can see what I’m working on and chime in on how to help
I’m still just getting started. Here’s what’s coming up:
Getting CivicBand fiscally sponsored by a 501c3
Add more monitoring and alerting, so I can fix sites as soon as there’s a problem
Add fetchers to the pipeline that will let me add school boards to CivicBand
Here’s how you can help:
Always and forever: share CivicBand. The more people use it, the better it gets
I owe many of you responses on the Advocate program; that’s still coming and I’d still love more volunteers
Give me feedback on how the site could be more useful. There’s nothing too big or too small, seriously.
One more thing:
I’m starting to play with campaign finance data, the first example of which is for Oakland campaign contributions going back a few decades. Reach out if you want this for your city or county.
Thanks,
Philip