[HN Gopher] Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free
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Building FireStriker: Making Civic Tech Free
Author : noleary
Score : 80 points
Date : 2026-03-26 18:03 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (firestriker.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (firestriker.org)
| dang wrote:
| URL doesn't seem to work?
| noleary wrote:
| Seems to be changing the .org to a .com
|
| https://firestriker.org/blog/building-firestriker-why-im-mak...
|
| --
|
| related, author is a friend with a less active HN account
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=blakeofwilliam
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| I have some experience in this space and I want to strongly
| encourage the author to reconsider their free as in beer model.
|
| Yes, your target users don't have a lot of money, but they also
| deserve a sense of whether or not you're going to keep
| maintaining this project. Additionally, they are generally NOT
| technical and will not have the skills necessary to set up or
| maintain this platform.
|
| Without a paid offering, they will have to run the software and
| will not have any clarity about your long term commitment to the
| project. Feel free to reach out to me. My email address is in my
| profile.
| caesil wrote:
| Kind of sad to see AI water use as the first listed issue
| motivating this.
|
| It is a completely fake concern. See here:
| https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| Okay. There are other criticisms of datacenter buildout that
| make this kind of product valuable. Moving on.
| csunoser wrote:
| I am more sympathetic to the OG.
|
| There are many good criticisms against data center. And yet,
| the water issue always comes up first. Must we spew
| false/untruthhood just so our political message is catchy? I
| suppose yes - in times of war/politics, the laws/truths are
| silent. But it doesn't have to be so here.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> the water issue always comes up first_
|
| I've never had it come up first. Neat how 2 people can have
| 2 opposite experiences based on their different life paths.
|
| Anyways: Between our 2 opposite experiences, it might as
| well be totally random, so I don't think the ordering of
| concerns is that important. Better to focus on substance,
| like the concerns themselves.
| tadfisher wrote:
| There is so much nuance and context missing that I can't see
| this as anything other than astroturfing.
|
| I can get behind "AI water use is not a serious concern" if all
| you are talking about is selling inference, and you're
| comparing some sort of usage metric (e.g. "water use per
| request"). Water and power use for inference is on the level of
| other heavy Internet products like video streaming or cloud
| compute.
|
| There is a lot I can't ignore, though. Model training is
| incredibly demanding, so much that OpenAI was trying to get $1
| trillion in investment to practically double the number of data
| centers in the United States by 2030. That is a serious concern
| when we have to make decisions between, say, consumer water
| availability and tech investment in water-scarce areas like
| Arizona and New Mexico.
|
| In Oregon, there are some unique problems with Amazon's water
| deals in Umatilla, where they are increasing nitrate
| concentration of the local groundwater through evaporative
| cooling, and refusing to pay for on-site treatment.
|
| I can go on about other environmental harms, but I think you
| should take a more nuanced look at the issue. Having ChatGPT
| summarize a news article is not an unreasonable demand compared
| to other compute activities, but AI in general is driving
| compute demand so high that the general public is forced to
| reckon with a problem that's been there since the beginning:
| _the expansion, operation and use of the Internet has physical
| environmental consequences_.
| showerst wrote:
| I've been working on legislative data for 15 years now, on open
| source scrapers with OpenStates and running a commercial product
| targeted at professionals (competitor to those in the article).
|
| We tried for years with OpenStates to run a free legislative
| tracking product before eventually having it partner with a
| commercial provider who was willing to contribute the resources
| to keep it alive and help out with the open source pieces (shout
| out to Plural, nice folks).
|
| Believe me when I say that this space is a classic nerd tar pit.
| It looks like a relatively easy problem, a few hundred scrapers,
| search, and some basic CRM functionality and you're off to the
| races.
|
| The problem is that behind the scenes the data is very
| complicated, and the sources constantly change and break in goofy
| ways. You need to be running hundreds of scrapers constantly
| (many of them against akamai or cloudflare), and working around
| new source website bugs or procedural edge cases every week. It
| doesn't scale like something like product or web search where you
| can just ignore broken pages, the penalty for missing things is
| too high. Tuning your workflow so people find what they need
| without getting buried is tough, because there are tens of
| thousands of bills a session about things people think they care
| about like "AI" or "taxes". On top of that, the low or zero
| budget clientele is often that mix of high-expectation and low
| domain knowledge that makes them a big support burden.
|
| Fiscalnote burned 750 million dollars in VC money on this and
| just went under this week, granted with a series of spectacular
| own-goals.
|
| I wish this author the best of luck, and if you want to team up
| on scrapers please give us a shout. But please be aware that
| you're promising the moon, and try to build a model that will be
| financially and effort-sustainable. Keeping this stuff going is a
| _slog_. I'm really hoping that someone can bring the professional
| level tools to normal people.
| orf wrote:
| > Fiscalnote burned 750 million dollars in VC money on this
|
| What percentage of that went towards solving the actual
| problem?
|
| 3/4 of a billion dollars is enough to pay many, many people 50$
| an hour to sit at a screen 24/7 and refresh any number of
| websites you want.
| waterfisher wrote:
| I appreciate the impetus behind this. But I'm unsure whether this
| warrants an HN post. The post text is AI-written, and there's no
| information on technical details--just a kind of vague problem
| statement. Nor was I able to find any code for the project
| elsewhere on the site.
| dlipovetsky wrote:
| The author might like knowing about a similar effort targeting
| Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR), that was discussed here a
| few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290916.
|
| It relies on automated scraping + human confirmation. Louis
| Rossman describes how it works in
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W420BOqga_s
| pimlottc wrote:
| This is great but confused me at first because it's slightly
| misusing the term "civic tech". It's generally used pretty
| broadly to include all government and gov-adjacent technology.
| Public monitoring and engagement tools are a part of it but
| that's just one piece. Civic tech includes actual government
| projects like Healthcare.gov and IRS Direct File (RIP);
| organizing platforms like MoveOn.org and ActBlue; and volunteer
| programs like Code for America and U.S. Digital Response.
|
| The line at the bottom of the page does a better job of
| describing what specifically this project is:
|
| "FireStriker is a free civic engagement and legislative
| intelligence platform for community organizations, unions, PACs,
| and activists."
| up2isomorphism wrote:
| I am always skeptical about making anything useful "free".
| Because unless there is no cost associated with that, "free" is a
| fake term, which only means someone else absorbs the cost. There
| are cases which makes sense, but not sure "civic tech" is one of
| them.
| croisillon wrote:
| next time just post the prompt
| tptacek wrote:
| All civic tech is awesome, but a word of advice (may or may not
| be applicable in your particular neck of the woods, but
| definitely is in mine):
|
| Public comment is one of the least effective mechanisms for
| influencing policy, at least at the margin. You can drastically
| amplify your influence with a simple change: move from public to
| private commentary, directly and personally addressing your state
| and local reps. They all have email addresses and I think it's
| more likely than not you'll be surprised when they (and it'll
| actually _be them_ , not some factotum) respond to your email.
|
| This would stop working if everybody did it, but I live in an
| unusually (famously, in fact) engaged municipality and have been
| unreasonably successful at influencing policy and the evidence I
| see is that almost nobody does this.
|
| There's probably a civic tech thingy to do here. Though I'd also
| be mindful of the appearance of canvassing. My experience is that
| decisionmakers very quickly clock canvassing efforts, and then
| mentally bucket input into "low-effort" and "high-effort", often
| in a way that amplifies smaller interests.
|
| I also think you can probably get a long way just by doing a
| better job than your policy adversaries at presenting
| information. Another thing I've noticed reps quickly clocking:
| the commenters who clearly have never read a budget, or who don't
| know the difference between an Enterprise Fund and the General
| Fund. These are also problems tech can solve, by digesting and
| contextualizing data so people can present informed (or informed-
| sounding) arguments.
| mememememememo wrote:
| Very good. I love the spirit. The cause.
|
| Not sure you should be free. You want to be sustainable but not
| for profit.
|
| Charging the customer is the small guys weapon to keep going.
|
| The big guys cal also do that but they can subsidize lossy
| departments and sell data, sell stovk etc.
|
| Make it GPLv3 open source if you want to offer a free.version
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