What Makes Civic Data So Hard to Structure
Why local government information is so difficult to organize well, and what I have learned from turning messy agendas, meetings, committees, and local issues into usable product surfaces at The Common News.
Devin Thakker
Essays, build logs, and notes on products, engineering, and civic tech.
Latest posts
What We Learned Expanding The Common News to 100 Cities
What changed as The Common News expanded to 100 cities serving nearly 42 million people: data quality, city-by-city variation, entity structure, publishing systems, and what scale actually means in local civic information.
The Data Model Behind The Common News
How I think about the core data model behind The Common News: municipalities, meetings, agendas, summaries, entities, and the relationships that turn messy civic documents into structured product surfaces.
Local Government SEO Is Won Through Specificity
Why local government content rarely wins through broad keywords alone, and how entity-rich civic pages, geographic specificity, and structured publishing make long-tail search the real opportunity.
How I Think About Trust in AI-Generated Civic Summaries
How I approach trust at The Common News: source grounding, scoped summarization, human-readable structure, and product decisions designed to make AI-generated civic coverage more reliable.
How I Turned The Common News Into a Local SEO Engine
A breakdown of the SEO system I built for The Common News: canonical summary URLs, structured metadata, entity-driven local relevance, server-rendered civic content, and municipality-level internal linking.
How I Built a Public RAG App for Chicago Budget Documents
A practical build log of creating a public-facing RAG app over large municipal budget PDFs, with source citations, embedded document viewing, quality tuning, and production deployment.
Why I Built The Common News: Local Government in Minutes, Not Hours
Why I built The Common News, the problem we saw with local government information delivery, and how we are making civic updates easier to follow.