Civicin local budgets made searchable
Municipal finance documents arrive as scanned PDFs and labyrinthine spreadsheets. Our Budget Explorer parses them into line-item search, year-over-year comparisons, and department-level breakdowns — so a community organizer can find the parks-department cut in 90 seconds, not three FOIA requests.
council votes indexed and searchable
Every roll-call vote in our network is tagged by topic, legislator, and outcome. A journalist covering a zoning dispute can pull every vote a council member has cast on housing in four years — in one query, with citations ready to paste.
permits mapped, updated daily
Building permits, demolition orders, variance requests — each geocoded and surfaced on an interactive map with owner details, approval history, and linked council votes. Organizers preparing testimony now arrive knowing exactly which projects are queued for their neighborhood.
I had three days before the zoning hearing. Normally I'd spend two of them just finding the right documents. With Civic's permit map, I had the full approval history, the council votes, and the developer's prior projects in one afternoon. I walked into that hearing knowing more than the developer's attorney.
Marcus Webb
Investigative Reporter · The Oakland Tribune
The field guide,
made interactive.
Council Votes Tracker
Every vote. Every legislator. Every time.
Search 1.2 million indexed roll-call votes by council member, topic, date range, or outcome. Export citation-ready summaries for journalism or testimony.
- Full-text vote search
- Legislator voting history
- CSV/JSON export
- Citation generator
Budget Explorer
Line-item search across 847 municipal budgets.
Navigate budget documents that were never designed to be navigated. Year-over-year comparisons, department drill-downs, and plain-language summaries of what changed and why.
- Year-over-year diffs
- Department drill-down
- FOIA-ready summaries
- Trend alerts
Permit Map
Every permit in your neighborhood, geocoded.
Building permits, demolition orders, and variance requests plotted on an interactive map — with linked council votes, owner history, and daily updates from 94 permit offices.
- Interactive geocoded map
- Owner & history lookup
- Linked council votes
- Hearing date alerts
CS students: this is the open-source project that matters.
47 active contributors · 3 repos · good-first-issue labels maintained