Support civic transparency for Small Business Saturday
Hello! If you’re seeing this, you’re interested in what we’re doing at CivicBand, and we’re pretty thrilled by this. We started this project because we wanted it to be easier for folks to have a deeper understanding of the governments that impacted their lives, from City Councils to School Boards to County Supervisors and beyond.
Originally we had just three cities: Alameda, Oakland, and Berkeley. We now track 1.6 million pages of data across 158 municipalities, and we want to grow from here.
We are independent, not backed by outside capital, and we have no intention of changing that. While we’re able to run pretty efficiently with our current tech setup, it’s not free to process and host all this data. We also want to add more cities in more states, and take a deeper crack at getting school board data searchable.
There are three ways you can help keep CivicBand running:
First and best: Sign up for a monthly subscription. They come in increments of $10, and each one represents the cost of keeping a site up and running.
Second: share this email with someone you know who wants to make civic data more available
Third: Support Galaxy Brain, the arts collective that fiscally sponsors CivicBand. Galaxy Brain provides creative and executive coaching, sells zines and art prints, and works as a full-service Risograph print studio and FDM 3D Printing shop.
CivicBand is only just getting started in terms of the tools and access we want to provide on top of civic government data. Some ideas we’d love to work on in 2025 include:
Search subscriptions, so you get updates when we get new data.
Cross-region searches, so you can search all the municipalities in a county, for example
Saved collections and notebooks, so that you have a single place to look at all the results that interest you.
Your support now helps plan for 2025 and make sure we remain running for years to come. Thanks for reading, reach out if you have any questions or feedback, and happy holidays ✨