The ProductCivicAide
CivicAide supports part-time officials balancing public service with work, family, and everything else. It reads the official meeting packet, briefs what matters, flags what changed since the last meeting, and stays quiet when nothing did. Every claim is cited or absent. It runs today for a real city: council briefs generated from the real packet, before the real meeting, with an audio version checked word-by-word against its own text.
It will never promise it's never wrong. It promises its errors are visible, citable, and structurally harder to repeat: a sitting councilmember reads and approves real outputs before features ship, and anything that fails that reading goes back until it passes.
CivicAide started as a Coda doc for one part-time councilmember processing 200-page council packets. As frontier models and agent frameworks matured, so did the ambition. Currently built on Anthropic's infrastructure, designed so cities are never locked to a single provider.
Council Briefs
When a meeting packet posts, CivicAide reads it and produces a brief an official can actually prepare from: what each item is, what it costs, where it came from, and what's worth asking before the vote. Every claim traces to a page in the packet or a public record, or it doesn't appear.
Developments, not documents
The brief tracks an item's path from committee to council and flags what changed since it last appeared — so you read the delta, not the whole packet again.
Silence as a feature
Routine items with nothing material get a sentence, not a page. A brief that flags everything is a brief you stop trusting.
Audio, fidelity-gated
Every brief gets an audio version, transcribed back and checked word-by-word against its own text before anyone hears it.
Local context
Briefs draw on the city's own strategic plan and the overlapping taxing bodies — county, schools, parks, library — that shape what an item really means.
Council briefs run in production for Elgin, Illinois today, reviewed by the sitting councilmember who depends on them. Want to judge the quality yourself? Request a sample brief.
The Origin
Built from actual workflow, not a theory of it.
CivicAide was originally built for part-time elected officials who are short on time due to day jobs, families, and the reality that local governance is a second (or third) shift. The first version was a Coda doc connected to various LLMs, using prompt chaining to process the 200-page council packets that land every week.
As frontier models improved and agent frameworks matured, the scope grew. Not because we went looking for problems, but because the tools became capable enough to address the ones we were already drowning in.
Not everything in CivicAide is AI. Automation is sufficient where it fits. The goal is capacity, not complexity.
PolicyAide
A multi-agent system for policy research: enter a topic, receive a professional-grade policy brief with citations, argument analysis, and compliance checking. Built on Anthropic's Agent SDK, inspired by Google's AI CoScientist paper. PolicyAide is the furthest along of CivicWork's tools and demonstrates what becomes possible when governance infrastructure is part of the design from the start.
The core insight: policy decisions are non-verifiable at the decision level (that's what democracy is for), but research quality itself can be verified through adversarial testing. PolicyAide stress-tests the reasoning before it reaches the decision-maker. Council makes the decision; the system makes sure the analysis is rigorous.
Specialized Agents
Supervisor
ResearchAnalyzes the research scope, determines data needs, and creates a structured research plan with exploration areas and success criteria.
External Data
ResearchWeb-grounded research across six categories: demographics, economics, legislation, comparable jurisdictions, news, and academic literature.
Generation
ResearchProduces diverse policy hypotheses spanning status quo to transformative approaches, grounded in the research data and uploaded documents.
Debate
TournamentHead-to-head policy evaluation. Builds cases for and against each hypothesis pair, delivers confidence-weighted verdicts that feed the ELO system.
Evolution
TournamentRefines losing hypotheses with additional evidence and reframing between tournament rounds. Validates that improvements don't introduce bias.
Proximity Check
QualityValidates novelty and overlap across the final policy options. Recommends merges for redundant proposals, ensures a diverse final set.
Meta-Review
SynthesisSynthesizes all agent outputs into a professional seven-section policy brief with citations, compliance checks, and bias detection.
Citation Verification
QualityVerifies every citation URL through cross-referencing and targeted web search. Labels each source as verified or unverified, and never fabricates URLs.
The Pipeline
Each research session runs through a tournament pipeline: hypotheses are generated, then compete head-to-head in ELO-rated debate rounds. Weak proposals evolve between rounds. The system stops when ratings converge or the round cap is reached.
Research
Supervisor→
External Data→
Generation
Tournament Loop
Repeats until ELO ratings converge
Debate
Head-to-head hypothesis evaluation
ELO Update
Bayesian rating adjustment
Evolution
Refine losing hypotheses
Convergence
Check if ratings stabilized
Debate → ELO → Evolution → Convergence → Debate …
Synthesis
Proximity Check→
Meta-Review→
Citation Verification
The Output
Every session produces a seven-section policy brief: the format a policy analyst would write for a council member, not a chatbot summary. All claims are cited. Citations are independently verified.
1Executive Summary
2Background & Legislative Context
3Comparable Jurisdiction Analysis
4Stakeholder Impact Assessment
5Fiscal & Economic Analysis
6Implementation Considerations
7Key Questions for Deliberation
Each brief includes minimum five comparable jurisdictions, equity dimensions, fiscal confidence levels, and five to eight decision-forcing questions for council deliberation. No recommendations. The system informs the decision, it doesn't make it.
The Origin: Elected Official Tools
CivicAide is designed so that AI tools reach staff before individual elected officials, building institutional capacity rather than creating information asymmetries.
That said, CivicAide started as a complete toolkit for one part-time councilmember. These tools proved the concept. The day-to-day workflow of elected officials was the first problem space where the approach was validated.
Orientation Aide
Essential onboarding for new elected officials: Open Meetings Act, Robert's Rules, ethical finance compliance, and a comprehensive transition guide.
Meeting Notes Aide
Create and manage meeting notes with automatic extraction of action items and newsletter content into organized tables for follow-up.
Action Item Aide
Task organization with automated reminders to ensure timely completion of commitments made in meetings and constituent interactions.
Newsletter & Email Aide
Draft and send professional newsletters and constituent emails with built-in Open Meetings Act compliance checking.
Project Status Aide
Track municipal project progress without complex project management software. Built for the way local government actually works.
Network Aide
A directory of local officials and taxing bodies for efficient collaboration with key stakeholders in your community.
Staff First, Then the Whole Organization
The elected official tools proved the concept, but CivicAide is designed for organizational deployment, starting with staff. The underlying data ingestion pipeline serves the entire municipal organization: city manager's office, community development, public works, and beyond.
With the arrival of organizational AI plugins, some of these may be deployments and configurations of shared tooling rather than standalone applications, meeting municipalities where their teams already work.
Data Layer & Agent Readiness
Municipal data is scattered across vendor platforms that don't talk to each other. Staff spend significant time manually looking things up across multiple systems. AI tools can't help if they can't access the data.
Working with U.S. Digital Response in Elgin, we mapped where municipal data lives, what's locked behind vendors, and what can be freed using open-source tools. Today, answering “what's the status of the water main project on Highland Avenue” requires checking three systems and calling someone back. In an agent-ready environment, an AI assistant pulls that answer in seconds because the data is structured and accessible. That's not replacing the public works staffer. It's giving them back the 15 minutes they spent toggling between systems.
The WebMCP integration for municipal platforms (Legistar, Municode, public meeting archives) is built and being published to GitHub. These tools use open standards to let AI systems read from the platforms municipalities already use. No custom APIs required.
Open-Source Tooling
CivicWork builds for model independence; the tools are designed so municipalities aren't locked into any single AI provider, the same way they shouldn't be locked into any single data vendor. The Coda MCP Server , a 34-tool integration layer for AI systems, is already used by Coda's engineering team to inform their official implementation.
The Municipal Plugin for Claude Code is live and open source. WebMCP integrations for municipal platforms are shipping soon. The governance frameworks, agent architecture, and data layer work regardless of which model powers them.
In development: the Municipal Plugin is adding a vendor contract analysis workflow. Upload a contract. See what you're paying for in plain language. Understand what could be built with open tools. It's designed to make the cost of vendor dependency legible, not to attack vendors, but to give municipalities the clarity to make informed decisions about their own infrastructure.
Where This Goes · Not Built Yet The governance layer
The long-term direction is an accountability layer for municipal AI: decision traceability, public-records-aware logging, and approval workflows that match how local government actually decides. Today, pieces of that exist inside CivicAide — citations, review gates, grounding checks — and the rest is roadmap, not product.
We'd rather tell you which is which than sell the roadmap as if it shipped. When a governance-layer component ships and survives real use, it moves up this page.
See the frameworks in action.
The Governance Assessment applies the Verifiability Framework and Trust Stack to your city's AI use case. Try it, or reach out directly.