Turning Scattered Local Resistance into a Coordinated National Movement
A civic engagement platform that scans every city council agenda in America, surfaces surveillance technology decisions, and gives organizers the tools to show up and push back.
1,000+
Government Agendas Monitored
Automated scanning across the country
Free
Released as Open Source
Available to civic orgs nationwide
8 weeks
MVP to Production
Rapid iterative delivery
Across the United States, local governments are quietly approving contracts with Flock AI—a surveillance technology company that deploys license plate readers and integrates with facial recognition systems, building vast databases that track citizens' movements. Opposition to these systems is growing, with privacy advocates, civil liberties groups, and concerned residents pushing back in city council meetings from coast to coast.
The problem? These decisions happen in thousands of towns, often buried in lengthy meeting agendas with little public notice. By the time residents learn their city is considering Flock AI, the contract is already signed. Organizers had no way to see the full picture—where these discussions were happening, when votes were scheduled, or how to coordinate a response across jurisdictions.
Our client saw an opportunity: what if you could scan every city council agenda in the country, surface the ones discussing surveillance technology, and give organizers the tools to mobilize locally while coordinating nationally? That was the challenge—build a platform that turns scattered local resistance into a coordinated movement.
Murmur is a civic engagement platform designed to surface local government activity and turn it into coordinated action. Here's what we built:
Agenda Intelligence We developed a crawler that continuously scans government websites and public meeting portals, extracting agendas and identifying discussions related to surveillance technology. Moderators can also review community-submitted tips, creating a hybrid system that catches what automation might miss.
Campaign Coordination When a relevant meeting is identified, organizers can create a campaign around it. The platform includes an integrated calendar and RSVP system, letting supporters signal their intent to attend and helping organizers gauge turnout before the meeting happens.
Frictionless Access To maximize engagement, we implemented passwordless authentication via magic links. No account creation friction—just enter your email, click a link, and you're in.
Location-Aware Alerts A geo-fencing system notifies users when relevant meetings are scheduled in their area, matching events to their interests and location so they never miss an opportunity to show up.
Enterprise-Grade Infrastructure Under the hood, we built a robust permission system with configurable roles, a public-facing API for integrations, and comprehensive admin tooling to manage the platform at scale.
We started with the simplest possible version: a basic system for manually creating and tracking events. This let us validate the core concept quickly and get real feedback from organizers in the field.
From there, we built iteratively. Each sprint added a new layer of capability—first the moderation tools, then the crawler, then geo-fencing—always driven by what users actually needed rather than assumptions. This agile approach meant the platform evolved organically, with regular releases keeping organizers engaged and giving us continuous insight into what was working and what wasn't.
By starting small and scaling up, we avoided over-engineering early and delivered a production-ready platform that matched real-world workflows from day one.
Rapid MVP Delivery We delivered a production-ready platform that enabled a full team to immediately begin running coordinated civic campaigns.
Vision to Reality Through close collaboration with the founding team, we helped transform their concept into a working product—iterating through challenges around data synchronization, notification timing, and user workflows to arrive at a solution that actually works in practice.
Open Source Release The software has been released as open source, making it freely available to civic organizations, advocacy groups, and communities nationwide who want to bring transparency to their local government.
Before Murmur, we'd find out about a Flock AI contract after it was signed. Now we know about it before the vote happens — and we can get people in the room. That changes everything.
Team
End-to-end product team — research through open source release
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