Built by a concerned parent.

What it is

CommUnity OS is civic infrastructure for every ZIP code: 56 pages, 8,084 elected officials, 54 bilingual guides, and a triage engine that turns "my landlord won't fix the heat" into a named legal lever and a deadline. It runs on roughly $7 a year. It works offline. It collects no identifying data. There are no accounts. There are no ads.

The protocol is public domain. The software is free for any neighborhood to deploy and operate — see the license for terms. Contribute anonymized aggregates back to the network so the next neighborhood benefits from what yours learned.

Why it exists

Most civic technology assumes perpetual growth. It requires venture capital, paid cloud services, API subscriptions, institutional partnerships. When those assumptions stop holding, the tools stop working.

CommUnity OS was built on the opposite assumption. The design question wasn't "what's the most powerful platform we can build" — it was "what civic infrastructure still functions when the assumptions of growth no longer hold?"

Every architectural decision was checked against that question. If a feature required a paid API, it was removed or replaced with a local pattern matcher. If a feature required user accounts, it was redesigned to work without identity. If a feature required always-on connectivity, an offline sync path was added.

Constraints that shaped the design

• $7/year operating cost — one domain registration. Backend on Cloudflare's free tier. Frontend on Netlify's free tier. No paid APIs in the critical path.
• Zero personal data — no accounts, no emails, no phone numbers. Nothing to leak and nothing to subpoena.
• Offline-capable — works without internet once cached; can sync via QR codes between phones in proximity.
• Constitutional constraints — certain trigger types are prohibited at the protocol level. The design refuses misuse.
• Works around bottlenecks — when the 311 system is slow or unavailable, a parallel information layer keeps neighbors oriented.

Advisory and review

Every page that gives clinical, legal, or safety guidance carries a "reviewed by" attribution at the top. Pages awaiting review say so plainly. A tool that gives medical guidance without a physician's review is not a community tool — it is a liability.

Help build this

This is a civic tool that works better when more people contribute. If you know how something should work in your field — how eviction really plays out, how SNAP applications actually get processed, how insurance denials can be fought — your expertise makes the next guide clearer and the next triage result more accurate.

Contribute expertise: /contribute