u/CivicInformer

What it is:

Civic Informer connects to a department's CAD or incident system and publishes a daily resident-facing newsletter, an interactive map, and neighborhood views. Department staff review content before it publishes, and there's an admin tool for announcements, alerts, and other specialty types of content.

Status: 1 signed Data Sharing Agreement (Bellingham PD, 8 months live, 900 newsletter subscribers, 75% open rate). Not in beta technically, but actively looking for additional pilot partners to expand into different geographies and schemas.

Who I'm looking for:

Anyone with a connection or interest in US police departments, sheriff's offices, or city PIOs who'd be open to participating in our limited no-cost pilot program in exchange for honest feedback and the ability to use them as a future reference.

What pilot departments get:

• Full product, no cost during pilot.
• Direct line to myself and my co-founder.
• Editorial editing / approval over newsletter and blog content.
• Full setup help, including a DSA template that's already cleared one city legal review.

DM me or comment if you're interested or know someone. See it live in Bellingham at Civicinformer.com/bellingham

Thanks :)

For the past year, I've been building a piece of Civic Tech I'd love honest feedback on. I have nothing to sell you in this post (all features are free for the public), instead, I'm looking for pushback now from people who'd actually use the department side of it. So, here's what I've built:

Civic Informer - In short, we turn data it into content that answers the question residents care about, what's happening near me? 

In long, we plugin to CAD / Incident data and use that to build daily newsletters, daily web reports, rolling 7-day, 30-day, neighborhood specific views, and an interactive map. We also have an admin interface where departments themselves can review / approve content, write announcements to post in the blog section, add 'alert' banners, get graphics for the department to post on socials (we have templates that update daily with actual data), and even learn some things with a backend analytics dashboard.

We've recently signed a DSA with Bellingham PD which is where we started, (900 newsletter subscribers, 75% open-rate daily) and we've spent the last months talking with ~15 more departments that all seem to feel a 3rd party transparency layer such as this would fit well into their strategic initiatives. However, we haven't gone beyond verbal agreements yes.

If anyone finds this interesting and would like to take a look, here's what I'd love to understand:

Would something like this solve a real problem for your department, or would it be a nice to have?

I'm not from the PD or municipal industry myself and for the most part don't even know what I don't know. Are there any 'hero' features or pain-points that I lean into in conversations?

Anything I'm missing that you would personally like to have on a platform like this?

General words of advice for attempting to build a government product?

Roast it if it deserves roasting. Better to hear it now than after spending another year building the wrong things. I'll drop the link in the comments for anyone that wants to take a look. 

Godspeed.