Public data, handled with care.
Civic Forecast is a research and civic-education project from API Automations. We normalize public, licensed, and government data into source-attributed, aggregate civic signals — and hold every source to the same governance, attribution, and privacy commitments.
A governed data pipeline
Every source moves through an auditable pipeline — a repeatable pattern of dataset → normalized signal → public attribution → civic context and alerts. Each layer is governed, and no layer re-exposes source records.
- Acquisition — Authorized API access or licensed feeds, with caching, retries, and rate-limit compliance — only through a provider's sanctioned method and credentials.
- Normalization — Mapped into internal schemas (FeedItem, MetricItem, Source) with source provenance preserved as a first-class field.
- Geographic alignment — Joined to stable identifiers — FIPS, district IDs, ISO country codes — so data aggregates by geography without record-level exposure.
- Signal derivation — Aggregates, deltas, rates, per-capita values, severity bands, and topic tags — transformative indicators, not the source records.
- Civic presentation — Cards, stat tiles, watchlists, explainers, and maps, with source attribution on every surface. No export, no record table.
- Measurement — Aggregate views, watchlist adds, and CTA clicks. No user-level export; partner analytics are aggregate-only.
Data governance & privacy
- No user-level sale or export — We never sell user-level data or export individual engagement records to any party.
- Aggregate-only analytics — Any partner reporting is limited to counts, rates, cohorts, and geography/topic buckets — never PII, never individual records.
- Attribution persistence — Source attribution stays visually present on maps, charts, cards, and briefs wherever a source contributes.
- Security — Secrets stay in untracked configuration, never in version control; least-privilege credentials; signed-URL separation of public and subscription media.
- Do no harm — Outputs are never used to target, harm, or oppress any group, and methodology is represented faithfully against each provider's documentation.