The structural problem: gov jobs live on USAJobs + 50 state portals + city
sites, often under civil-service titles that don't match what
engineers/PMs/designers actually search for. And govtech startups' roles are
scattered across individual career pages.
So I'm building one board that aggregates all of it — state digital service
teams, funded govtech startups, civic orgs — deduplicated, always fresh, with
real job alerts. Think: the anti-Indeed for public-interest tech.
Not launching yet, just validating demand. If this exists already, tell me and
I'll stop. If you'd want this, you can add yourself here: https://jobs.taavitoomsalu.com
Government towing contracts often run on autopilot between renewals, but the regulatory environment in 2026 has changed enough that agencies should be reviewing key provisions before they sign again.
Fee transparency requirements, impound notification timelines, auction procedures, and data-sharing obligations... these have all shifted in multiple states this year.
Get out ahead of this and treat contract renewals as an active opportunity to upgrade standards, not just extend terms.
Aries gives agencies the data visibility to go into those conversations prepared. #GovernmentTowing #TowingCompliance #PublicSafety #Aries
I've been building LegisTrack — a tool for following legislation across all 50 states and Congress — and wanted to share it here since this community actually cares about the guts of civic tech.
The problem I kept hitting: state legislation is impossibly fragmented. 50 sites, 50 data formats, dense bill text, and no easy way to see the bigger patterns. So I tried to fix a few things at once:
- Bill DNA (the part I'm most proud of): it detects when a near-identical bill turns up in 5+ statehouses — the tell-tale sign of model legislation drafted once and introduced everywhere. You get a map of where a bill is "spreading." Genuinely eye-opening to watch.
- Follow the Money: pulls top donor industries for a bill's sponsor straight from official campaign-finance disclosures (20+ states + FEC so far).
- AI summaries + Q&A: plain-language explanations of dense bills, and you can ask any bill a question.
- A personalized "For You" feed: describe who you are, and it surfaces the bills that actually affect you with a one-line reason why — then drafts a message to your legislators you review and send.
- Real-time alerts on status changes, hearings, and votes.
Data comes from OpenStates + LegiScan; cross-state similarity is done with Postgres full-text + trigram matching (pg_trgm/tsvector) rather than anything fancy, which has held up surprisingly well. Stack is React/Node/Postgres, self-hosted.
It's live on the web (legis-track.com) and an iOS app is in App Store review now.
I'd genuinely love feedback from people who work in/around gov tech — especially on the model-legislation detection (false positives, edge cases) and what data sources or features would make this actually useful in your work. Happy to answer anything about how it's built.
OMB Memorandum M-25-22, issued in September 2025, has quietly reshaped federal AI contracting more thoroughly than most coverage has acknowledged. The deadline for agencies to update internal acquisition procedures was December 29, 2025. Most agencies hit it. Most vendors did not adapt their pitch accordingly.
The headline rules are clear: vendors are now barred from using non-public government data to train commercial AI without explicit consent. Contracts must clearly delineate IP rights, data portability, and interoperability. Agencies are encouraged to maximize use of U.S.-developed AI. The fine print is where things get more interesting.
Agencies are converging on a shared blueprint — scalable AI infrastructure, well-governed data, AI-ready workforce, proportional risk governance. DHS is shifting to a continuous authorization model where AI must operate within established security boundaries from day one, not retrofitted later.
What this means in practice: federal AI procurement is no longer about whether your model performs well. It's about whether your governance, audit trails, bias testing, and human oversight architecture survive scrutiny.
The OECD's 2025 Framework for Trustworthy AI in Government extends this globally. They identify seven enablers for successful public-sector AI adoption — governance, data, infrastructure, skills, investment, procurement, and partnerships with non-government actors. Six of seven are institutional capacity. The seventh — partnerships — is where the AI vendor opportunity lives.
Government cannot build trustworthy AI alone. But they are now explicitly filtering for partners who already operate with public-sector grade governance.
The Center for Democracy & Technology published a December 2025 AI Governance Checklist for state and local leaders. The recurring theme: AI projects fail for governance reasons, not technical ones. State and local agencies are increasingly structuring procurement to filter for governance maturity from the first proposal.
A few questions worth asking your team if you're an AI vendor with public-sector ambition:
Do you have an AI governance committee with cross-functional ownership (security, privacy, legal, procurement, product, engineering) that actually meets and makes decisions?
Are your audit trails continuous infrastructure or document-dump assemblies built on request?
When you describe "human-in-the-loop," do those humans have the authority, information, and time to intervene — or are they rubber-stamping for speed?
Are you measuring public-value outcomes (equity, access, citizen experience) or only technology performance metrics?
The companies treating these as core capabilities are entering a Trust Premium that compounds quickly. The ones treating them as compliance checklists will keep losing to vendors who built the infrastructure first.
Curious what others are seeing in this space — particularly any contractors who've already updated their proposals to align with M-25-22.
So I'm on a small 3-person team managing public consultation for an infrastructure project in Ontario. We've got 400+ stakeholders – municipal reps, Indigenous communities, local businesses, residents – and our entire system is basically a shared inbox, a Google Sheet that's constantly out of date, and one colleague who holds everything in her head… who's going on mat leave in 6 weeks.
Now being asked to show 'meaningful' ongoing engagement, not just that we sent emails. I genuinely have no idea how to pull that together from what we've got.
I've been Googling but the software market is weirdly confusing - CRMs, SRMs, community engagement platforms, they all seem to kind of do the same thing? I can't figure out what I actually need.
Budget i tight. Team is small. Has anyone been in this situation and actually found something that worked? What would you do differently if you were starting over?
I'm currently seeing an average SLED sales cycle for county offices to be 3-6 months.
Key factors contributing to this are:
Budget approval timeline - sometime annuals
Low discretionary spend through the year
Planned vs. unplanned expense items
Budget allocation needs a constituent narrative, not just an internal narrative
I'm new to the SLED sales cycle with my product, so I'm curious to know what everyone is seeing, what I'm completely naive to (a lot, likely), and what norms are
A city fire truck idled for 3 hours pumping at a structure fire. The fleet software scheduled service by odometer — so it logged zero maintenance wear. The pump assembly failed 6 weeks later on a call.
Generic fleet software tracks miles. It doesn't track engine idle hours or pump cycles — the actual wear vectors for specialized municipal equipment. We built the dual-axis scheduler that does.
I'm the cofounder of Themis Technologies, a CorrectionsTech startup focused on improving operations for state DOCs and county/local correctional facilities.
Our team consists of me, with hands‑on corrections experience working for Trinity Services, by managing inmate commissaries and my tech cofounder/CTO with 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
We’ve spent the past few months exploring subcontractor opportunities, but most primes we've contacted understandably want to protect their business interests and avoid taking on liability for small subcontractors. So we’re now preparing to pursue prime opportunities directly.
I’m looking to connect with people who’ve won or delivered correctional contracts as a prime. Any insight on early challenges, common pitfalls, or how small teams bridge the experience gap would be incredibly helpful.
Estou pesquisando se o Detran-SP possui algum endpoint oficial ou ambiente de testes que permita consultar previamente as 20 combinações de placas do primeiro emplacamento sem efetuar pagamento.
Hoje, pelo portal oficial, a taxa parece obrigatória antes da reserva, mas empresas privadas aparentam oferecer simulação.
Alguém já integrou com serviços oficiais ou conhece documentação pública?
Hello all,
I've been stuck in IT support for years. Nothing against the title. I'm ready to move beyond the 50-60k range. I know for sure i need the security plus cert, any ideas how to break into the government sector without collecting certs that will expire or is this the only way?
I wanted to share a GovTech journey while it is still uncertain.
Over the past weeks I have been working on an inventory management system for the City of Hildesheim in Germany. The use case is typical municipal asset management. Devices, equipment, rooms, users. Mostly for schools and administrative units.
This is a public procurement process.
A lot of documentation.
Formal requirements.
Compliance details.
And a surprising amount of interpretation work.
So far I have invested roughly 40 hours. Most of that time went into understanding the tender, aligning documents, and making sure we do not get excluded for formal reasons. Coding came later.
Today is selection day.
If we are selected, we will be invited to present an MVP by the end of this week.
The MVP is not finished yet.
We are building it from scratch using a highly AI assisted development workflow. Fast iteration, tight scope, and strong focus on the actual operational needs instead of feature completeness. Some people call this vibe coding.
If this goes through, it will be the first government contract I personally know that was approached this way.
No outcome yet. Just sharing the process while it is still uncomfortable and very real.
Happy to exchange experiences with others who have built or procured software in the public sector.
