It's been about a year and a half since I left Apple to work on InformUp.org. At the time I had the idea for the service, but little else. The goal was, and still is, to enable folks to engage directly with their elected officials with as little effort as possible. The hope being that this regular heartbeat of community engagement not only would lead to better decision making by elected officials, but could serve as a foundation upon which a stronger civil society can be built (you know, nothing too ambitious).

Where We are now

We formed as a nonprofit in January and began weekly reporting on Pittsburgh City Council. Each week's article includes The 3 most important agenda items from that week, such as:

City Council considering first time regulations for short-term rentals (AirBnB)
Council introduces legislation to protect gender-affirming care
City to start Pilot program selling homes directly to residents

Each article includes a survey to collect readers' preferences related to those same issues:

Do you think the income requirement (not above $128,775 for a family of 4) is appropriate for this program?
Do you support Councilmember Warwick's proposed ordinance to prohibit withholding or denying medical care based on a person's gender identity or expression?
Please rank which elements of short-term rentals, or which impacts from unregulated rentals are most important to manage with new regulations

Once we get at least 50 responses in a given week, we deliver survey results directly to council during the public comment section of the next week's Council meeting.

We presented for the first time in June. and are on track to report weekly from here on out. It was a big milestone for us (and the one I was waiting on before following up).

Our impact so far

Feedback from readers and elected officials has been very positive. Everyone appreciates the reporting and is excited by our approach. We've been able to generate donations and some support from foundations as well.

More concretely our reporting is helping to close information gaps. Our coverage of expired grant funds, which included losing $234k for our city's bike share program was the first that BikePGH, our city's (very effective) bike/ped advocacy organization, as well as POGOH, the organization that runs the bike share program, had heard of the lost funds. Oh, and someone on Reddit said we were "the best reporting in the city by far", so that's exciting.

What's next

While early signs are good, we still have a long way to go, even in Pittsburgh. We need to:

Show that delivering reader feedback can influence actions taken by elected officials
Grow to represent a larger and representative population of the city.
See if this work can be sustainable with donations made in a Patreon/Substack manner

I really think that this form of reporting + representation can be an effective model of promoting a healthy and engaged public around any and every elected body across the country. We have a lot of problems to solve before we'll know if that's true, but I'm optimistic we can get there. It's not trivial: It's one thing to support a city like Pittsburgh, who livestreams every meeting and posts their agendas and legislation online, and it's something completely different to support a small community, who may not have any local news reporting, whose officials have no interest in transparency or public engagement, but we will figure out how to make it work.

Thank you

Thanks again to everyone who shared feedback and gekoed me to refine our approach and to give me the confidence that this can work. I'd love to hear any new questions or thoughts you may have or just catch up and hear how things are going with you. Stay tuned. hopefully it wont be too long before we have something exciting to report.