I've been working on legislative data for 15 years now, on open source scrapers with OpenStates and running a commercial product targeted at professionals (competitor to those in the article).
We tried for years with OpenStates to run a free legislative tracking product before eventually having it partner with a commercial provider who was willing to contribute the resources to keep it alive and help out with the open source pieces (shout out to Plural, nice folks).
Believe me when I say that this space is a classic nerd tar pit. It looks like a relatively easy problem, a few hundred scrapers, search, and some basic CRM functionality and you're off to the races.
The problem is that behind the scenes the data is very complicated, and the sources constantly change and break in goofy ways. You need to be running hundreds of scrapers constantly (many of them against akamai or cloudflare), and working around new source website bugs or procedural edge cases every week. It doesn't scale like something like product or web search where you can just ignore broken pages, the penalty for missing things is too high. Tuning your workflow so people find what they need without getting buried is tough, because there are tens of thousands of bills a session about things people think they care about like "AI" or "taxes". On top of that, the low or zero budget clientele is often that mix of high-expectation and low domain knowledge that makes them a big support burden.
Fiscalnote burned 750 million dollars in VC money on this and just went under this week, granted with a series of spectacular own-goals.
I wish this author the best of luck, and if you want to team up on scrapers please give us a shout. But please be aware that you're promising the moon, and try to build a model that will be financially and effort-sustainable. Keeping this stuff going is a _slog_. I'm really hoping that someone can bring the professional level tools to normal people.
I have some experience in this space and I want to strongly encourage the author to reconsider their free as in beer model.
Yes, your target users don’t have a lot of money, but they also deserve a sense of whether or not you’re going to keep maintaining this project. Additionally, they are generally NOT technical and will not have the skills necessary to set up or maintain this platform.
Without a paid offering, they will have to run the software and will not have any clarity about your long term commitment to the project. Feel free to reach out to me. My email address is in my profile.
This is great but confused me at first because it's slightly misusing the term "civic tech". It's generally used pretty broadly to include all government and gov-adjacent technology. Public monitoring and engagement tools are a part of it but that's just one piece. Civic tech includes actual government projects like Healthcare.gov and IRS Direct File (RIP); organizing platforms like MoveOn.org and ActBlue; and volunteer programs like Code for America and U.S. Digital Response.
The line at the bottom of the page does a better job of describing what specifically this project is:
"FireStriker is a free civic engagement and legislative intelligence platform for community organizations, unions, PACs, and activists."
All civic tech is awesome, but a word of advice (may or may not be applicable in your particular neck of the woods, but definitely is in mine):
Public comment is one of the least effective mechanisms for influencing policy, at least at the margin. You can drastically amplify your influence with a simple change: move from public to private commentary, directly and personally addressing your state and local reps. They all have email addresses and I think it's more likely than not you'll be surprised when they (and it'll actually be them, not some factotum) respond to your email.
This would stop working if everybody did it, but I live in an unusually (famously, in fact) engaged municipality and have been unreasonably successful at influencing policy and the evidence I see is that almost nobody does this.
There's probably a civic tech thingy to do here. Though I'd also be mindful of the appearance of canvassing. My experience is that decisionmakers very quickly clock canvassing efforts, and then mentally bucket input into "low-effort" and "high-effort", often in a way that amplifies smaller interests.
I also think you can probably get a long way just by doing a better job than your policy adversaries at presenting information. Another thing I've noticed reps quickly clocking: the commenters who clearly have never read a budget, or who don't know the difference between an Enterprise Fund and the General Fund. These are also problems tech can solve, by digesting and contextualizing data so people can present informed (or informed-sounding) arguments.
I appreciate the impetus behind this. But I'm unsure whether this warrants an HN post. The post text is AI-written, and there's no information on technical details--just a kind of vague problem statement. Nor was I able to find any code for the project elsewhere on the site.
The author might like knowing about a similar effort targeting Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR), that was discussed here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290916.
There is so much nuance and context missing that I can't see this as anything other than astroturfing.
I can get behind "AI water use is not a serious concern" if all you are talking about is selling inference, and you're comparing some sort of usage metric (e.g. "water use per request"). Water and power use for inference is on the level of other heavy Internet products like video streaming or cloud compute.
There is a lot I can't ignore, though. Model training is incredibly demanding, so much that OpenAI was trying to get $1 trillion in investment to practically double the number of data centers in the United States by 2030. That is a serious concern when we have to make decisions between, say, consumer water availability and tech investment in water-scarce areas like Arizona and New Mexico.
In Oregon, there are some unique problems with Amazon's water deals in Umatilla, where they are increasing nitrate concentration of the local groundwater through evaporative cooling, and refusing to pay for on-site treatment.
I can go on about other environmental harms, but I think you should take a more nuanced look at the issue. Having ChatGPT summarize a news article is not an unreasonable demand compared to other compute activities, but AI in general is driving compute demand so high that the general public is forced to reckon with a problem that's been there since the beginning: the expansion, operation and use of the Internet has physical environmental consequences.
There are many good criticisms against data center. And yet, the water issue always comes up first. Must we spew false/untruthhood just so our political message is catchy? I suppose yes - in times of war/politics, the laws/truths are silent. But it doesn't have to be so here.
I've never had it come up first. Neat how 2 people can have 2 opposite experiences based on their different life paths.
Anyways: Between our 2 opposite experiences, it might as well be totally random, so I don't think the ordering of concerns is that important. Better to focus on substance, like the concerns themselves.
I am always skeptical about making anything useful "free". Because unless there is no cost associated with that, "free" is a fake term, which only means someone else absorbs the cost. There are cases which makes sense, but not sure "civic tech" is one of them.
I've been working on legislative data for 15 years now, on open source scrapers with OpenStates and running a commercial product targeted at professionals (competitor to those in the article).
We tried for years with OpenStates to run a free legislative tracking product before eventually having it partner with a commercial provider who was willing to contribute the resources to keep it alive and help out with the open source pieces (shout out to Plural, nice folks).
Believe me when I say that this space is a classic nerd tar pit. It looks like a relatively easy problem, a few hundred scrapers, search, and some basic CRM functionality and you're off to the races.
The problem is that behind the scenes the data is very complicated, and the sources constantly change and break in goofy ways. You need to be running hundreds of scrapers constantly (many of them against akamai or cloudflare), and working around new source website bugs or procedural edge cases every week. It doesn't scale like something like product or web search where you can just ignore broken pages, the penalty for missing things is too high. Tuning your workflow so people find what they need without getting buried is tough, because there are tens of thousands of bills a session about things people think they care about like "AI" or "taxes". On top of that, the low or zero budget clientele is often that mix of high-expectation and low domain knowledge that makes them a big support burden.
Fiscalnote burned 750 million dollars in VC money on this and just went under this week, granted with a series of spectacular own-goals.
I wish this author the best of luck, and if you want to team up on scrapers please give us a shout. But please be aware that you're promising the moon, and try to build a model that will be financially and effort-sustainable. Keeping this stuff going is a _slog_. I'm really hoping that someone can bring the professional level tools to normal people.
> Fiscalnote burned 750 million dollars in VC money on this
What percentage of that went towards solving the actual problem?
3/4 of a billion dollars is enough to pay many, many people 50$ an hour to sit at a screen 24/7 and refresh any number of websites you want.
I have some experience in this space and I want to strongly encourage the author to reconsider their free as in beer model.
Yes, your target users don’t have a lot of money, but they also deserve a sense of whether or not you’re going to keep maintaining this project. Additionally, they are generally NOT technical and will not have the skills necessary to set up or maintain this platform.
Without a paid offering, they will have to run the software and will not have any clarity about your long term commitment to the project. Feel free to reach out to me. My email address is in my profile.
This is great but confused me at first because it's slightly misusing the term "civic tech". It's generally used pretty broadly to include all government and gov-adjacent technology. Public monitoring and engagement tools are a part of it but that's just one piece. Civic tech includes actual government projects like Healthcare.gov and IRS Direct File (RIP); organizing platforms like MoveOn.org and ActBlue; and volunteer programs like Code for America and U.S. Digital Response.
The line at the bottom of the page does a better job of describing what specifically this project is:
"FireStriker is a free civic engagement and legislative intelligence platform for community organizations, unions, PACs, and activists."
All civic tech is awesome, but a word of advice (may or may not be applicable in your particular neck of the woods, but definitely is in mine):
Public comment is one of the least effective mechanisms for influencing policy, at least at the margin. You can drastically amplify your influence with a simple change: move from public to private commentary, directly and personally addressing your state and local reps. They all have email addresses and I think it's more likely than not you'll be surprised when they (and it'll actually be them, not some factotum) respond to your email.
This would stop working if everybody did it, but I live in an unusually (famously, in fact) engaged municipality and have been unreasonably successful at influencing policy and the evidence I see is that almost nobody does this.
There's probably a civic tech thingy to do here. Though I'd also be mindful of the appearance of canvassing. My experience is that decisionmakers very quickly clock canvassing efforts, and then mentally bucket input into "low-effort" and "high-effort", often in a way that amplifies smaller interests.
I also think you can probably get a long way just by doing a better job than your policy adversaries at presenting information. Another thing I've noticed reps quickly clocking: the commenters who clearly have never read a budget, or who don't know the difference between an Enterprise Fund and the General Fund. These are also problems tech can solve, by digesting and contextualizing data so people can present informed (or informed-sounding) arguments.
I appreciate the impetus behind this. But I'm unsure whether this warrants an HN post. The post text is AI-written, and there's no information on technical details--just a kind of vague problem statement. Nor was I able to find any code for the project elsewhere on the site.
Very good. I love the spirit. The cause.
Not sure you should be free. You want to be sustainable but not for profit.
Charging the customer is the small guys weapon to keep going.
The big guys cal also do that but they can subsidize lossy departments and sell data, sell stovk etc.
Make it GPLv3 open source if you want to offer a free.version
The author might like knowing about a similar effort targeting Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR), that was discussed here a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290916.
It relies on automated scraping + human confirmation. Louis Rossman describes how it works in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W420BOqga_s
Tech for Palestine runs a (free) incubator for civic tech. Would encourage the OP to apply!
https://techforpalestine.org/incubator
next time just post the prompt
Kind of sad to see AI water use as the first listed issue motivating this.
It is a completely fake concern. See here: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
There is so much nuance and context missing that I can't see this as anything other than astroturfing.
I can get behind "AI water use is not a serious concern" if all you are talking about is selling inference, and you're comparing some sort of usage metric (e.g. "water use per request"). Water and power use for inference is on the level of other heavy Internet products like video streaming or cloud compute.
There is a lot I can't ignore, though. Model training is incredibly demanding, so much that OpenAI was trying to get $1 trillion in investment to practically double the number of data centers in the United States by 2030. That is a serious concern when we have to make decisions between, say, consumer water availability and tech investment in water-scarce areas like Arizona and New Mexico.
In Oregon, there are some unique problems with Amazon's water deals in Umatilla, where they are increasing nitrate concentration of the local groundwater through evaporative cooling, and refusing to pay for on-site treatment.
I can go on about other environmental harms, but I think you should take a more nuanced look at the issue. Having ChatGPT summarize a news article is not an unreasonable demand compared to other compute activities, but AI in general is driving compute demand so high that the general public is forced to reckon with a problem that's been there since the beginning: the expansion, operation and use of the Internet has physical environmental consequences.
Okay. There are other criticisms of datacenter buildout that make this kind of product valuable. Moving on.
I am more sympathetic to the OG.
There are many good criticisms against data center. And yet, the water issue always comes up first. Must we spew false/untruthhood just so our political message is catchy? I suppose yes - in times of war/politics, the laws/truths are silent. But it doesn't have to be so here.
> the water issue always comes up first
I've never had it come up first. Neat how 2 people can have 2 opposite experiences based on their different life paths.
Anyways: Between our 2 opposite experiences, it might as well be totally random, so I don't think the ordering of concerns is that important. Better to focus on substance, like the concerns themselves.
I am always skeptical about making anything useful "free". Because unless there is no cost associated with that, "free" is a fake term, which only means someone else absorbs the cost. There are cases which makes sense, but not sure "civic tech" is one of them.
URL doesn't seem to work?
Seems to be changing the .org to a .com
https://firestriker.org/blog/building-firestriker-why-im-mak...
--
related, author is a friend with a less active HN account https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=blakeofwilliam