Hello! Thanks for your patience between emails; CivicBand has not been idle.

Recently, I crossed 900 municipalities being tracked in CivicBand, with over 9.8 million pages under index. CivicBand is in all 50 of the United States, a sizable chunk of Canadian provinces, and Puerto Rico.

The 900th municipality was Palm Beach, FL, meaning researchers and activists can now track everything happening at the local level for Mar-a-Lago, as well as see the history of Jeffrey Epstein’s villa on the strip.

The bigger news is that I’m finally ready to put CivicObserver into alpha, and y’all get to hear about it first. CivicObserver is the unified search and alerting solution I’ve been promising since the very beginning. You’ll be able to search across the entire CivicBand dataset, save interesting pages to notebooks, and create search alerts that will update at least once a day.

Right now, search alerts happen over email, but I’m adding Slack webhooks, Discord, Bluesky, and Mastodon over the course of this week.

Eventually, CivicObserver will be the paid service that helps offset the costs of CivicBand (as reminder, CivicBand is now a project of the Raft Foundation, and you can donate to help keep us going). But you all here can have early access for free for the foreseeable future, because you were an early believer in CivicBand. Send me the email address you want the account at, and we’ll get you set up.

It’s honestly incredible what you can find when you have full search over the database, and I’m excited to see what you discover. I’d love to put the most interesting finds into this newsletter, and use that as a launching point to get CivicBand and CivicObserver into more hands.

To that end, if you want to guarantee yourself unlimited access to CivicObserver basically forever, I could use help managing this newsletter and our social media presence. There’s an entire country’s worth of data people could be making use of, and the only thing in their way is knowing about it.

As wild as it might be to say I’m just getting started after announcing all of this, I still think that’s true. There’s so much more I want to bring in to CivicBand — school boards, election finance, and every municipality I can lay hands on — and I want all of that usable by CivicObserver as the best activism, journalism, and research tool that exists.

I’m always open to suggestions, ideas, and collaborations, and I can’t wait to see how y’all use what we built.