r/civictech

I’ve been building a civic engagement tool for the past two years while working full-time as a software engineer in Boise. Instead of a complaint box like SeeClickFix, it produces structured assessment data: auto-populates parcel and zoning info from a photo, then asks the community to collectively research feasibility through specific assessment types (housing conditions, traffic counts, cost estimates, setback verification).

The idea is that community input shouldn’t stop at ‘this is broken.’ The platform asks ‘okay, what’s actually here?’ and structures the answer so planning departments can use it in a staff report.

Looking for honest feedback: crowdforge.dev (the demo button, “see what’s being built”, is at the bottom of the page).

Is the assessment workflow too heavy for a casual user? What’s confusing? What’s missing? What would make you ignore this entirely?

Slightly old-school civic tech question: has anyone here worked on tools that help people send physical mail to public officials?

A lot of civic action products seem to optimize for petitions, email forms, call scripts, or meeting transcripts. Physical mail is slower and less shiny, but it still goes through official office workflows, and the address-finding / printing / mailing part is annoying enough that most people never do it.

I’m curious whether people think this is a useful area for civic tech, or whether it is mostly nostalgia and the real leverage is elsewhere.

Hi everyone — I’m building an early-stage idea and would really value blunt feedback from people who work with public information.

The concept is a source-linked public data tool that continuously monitors open sources and turns scattered information into structured profiles, timelines, and relationship maps for public figures, organizations, and local movements. It does not try to make judgments or label people — it just connects already available data into a clearer picture.

I’m starting at city scale first because I want to test whether this is actually useful before thinking about state or country coverage.

I’d love to hear:

• Would this be useful in your work?
• What would you expect it to do first?
• What would make you trust it?
• What would make you ignore it?
• Would you ever pay for something like this, or recommend it to someone who would?

I’m especially interested in feedback from journalists, OSINT folks, researchers, civic tech people, and anyone who deals with fragmented public information.

If you think this idea is weak, confusing, or overcomplicated, please say so — that kind of feedback is exactly what I’m looking for.

Some friends and I built a small experiment to make city council meetings easier to navigate.

The problem I ran into as a resident was that city council meetings are boring and take too long to attend in person. The online minutes/recap were pretty hard to digest.

I'm experimenting with AI transcripts, search, and summaries to make local government easier to follow (along with an alerting system).

I'm curious:

• Is anyone else working on similar tools?
• What would make something like this actually useful?
• What would you be skeptical of?

Happy to share details or a demo if people are interested.

P.S. It's really cool to fnd this reddit community and see many others are working on similar goodwill projects!