The Flint water crisis exposed many deficiencies in all layers of government, infrastructure management, and public health. But one particularly important lesson that arose is that it is absolutely critical for local government bodies and organizations that serve the public to have organized, accessible, protected methods for storing, sharing, and using data.
As the city worked to identify which homes had lead service lines and were at greatest risk for lead leaching into their water supply, officials couldn’t quickly retrieve that information because, as Ron Fonger of the Flint Journal reported in 2015, it was stored on thousands of index cards that weren’t easy to search or navigate, let alone be used to quickly deploy strategic solutions that would minimize harm to residents.
That scenario, and wanting to help prevent issues like it, inspired an idea for Mott Park Resident Daniel Kurin. Kurin, who graduated from Kettering University with a degree in electrical engineering, started thinking about ways he could help build municipal governments and small nonprofit organizations tools that would help store information in safer and more useful ways.
“Seeing the index cards with water pipe information in the basement of City Hall, to me that’s a really good picture for poor information storage, or not having access to information, leading to a vacuum of information, leading to poor decision-making,” Kurin said. “If you don’t have a good structure and if you can’t actually find out what’s going on in the community, then the decisions are going to suffer. The water crisis was obviously a big, disastrous example of this. But I think it’s pretty common. Sometimes how information gets stored is sort of on the back burner, or people don’t think about it until they need it.”
What ultimately materialized from Kurin’s thought process then is Civic OS, an organization and software platform focused on helping governments and nonprofit organizations build and manage digital services more efficiently. It provides open-source, low-code tools that allow teams to create applications, manage data, and deliver services without requiring extensive technical expertise.
“I’ve been working on this for like eight years in one form or another,” Kurin said. “I wrote a white paper back in 2019 about Civic OS. My vision has been to make something flexible that nonprofits and governments can use to run their databases.”
Providing a Public Good
The Civic OS mission is to modernize civic technology by making it more accessible, flexible, and affordable, which would help reduce reliance on costly custom-built systems or replace piecemeal systems or processes that lack the functionality to do all of the things an organization needs. Guided by principles of open government, open data, and open source, Civic OS emphasizes transparency, collaboration, and community impact, prioritizing serving public-good organizations over maximizing financial gains.
“The reason why I’m doing this is because I want healthier communities, I want stronger communities, and I want to empower the people who are serving the community with the tools that they need to be more effective,” Kurin said.
Civic OS was launched as an L3C instead of an LLC. L3Cs are for-profit entities, but they are mission-oriented and prioritize a social good over profit. The platform is currently in a beta phase as Kurin perfects it. He recently launched a pilot project in collaboration with the Mott Park Recreation Association. The volunteer-led organization is in charge of a clubhouse that members of the public can book for events, but they ran into an issue that was a good problem to have but still a problem nonetheless: an increase in popularity of the venue.
Their volunteers used tools like Google Calendar and Google Documents to keep track of things and shared information through email. That system was fine, but could create confusion as demand grew because all of the information was not housed in one easily searchable place that all of the volunteers could access or that the public could see to easily check what dates were available.
After meeting with Kurin, the recreation association volunteers identified a few key needs: an integrated booking platform, a public-facing calendar, and the ability to accept electronic payments. Civic OS has met all of those needs, organized their processes, and freed up volunteers to have to do less administrative work to keep information organized.
That’s exactly the type of outcome Kurin is hoping for as he begins working with other clients.
“I don’t think anybody signs up to work or volunteer at a nonprofit so they can shuffle spreadsheets around,” Kurin said. “It’s a necessity to organize things, but it introduces a lot of friction that gets in the way of them doing what they actually want to do, which is help people. So it’s very rewarding to see somebody say, ‘Our volunteers aren’t wasting time going back and forth about a specific date.’ It’s just one system now. All the information is in it and everybody can look at it, and now instead of administering data, volunteers can spend more time doing community cleanups or more meaningful things that have more direct impact.”
Kurin is also working on a pilot project with the Flint Freedom Schools Collaborative. He’s working with them to create a staff portal to keep documents secure in one place. He said he’s also on the verge of announcing a third pilot project to use Civic OS to create a client intake system that will help refer community members to different partners to receive specific services and track those data points.
“Those data points and demographic information will let them be able to say at the end of the grant period, ‘Here’s every single person that we’ve helped,’” Kurin said. “Or even strategically to say, ‘A lot of people have been coming in with these concerns and we don’t really have a great partner for that, so we need more partners to support that concern.’ So it really is like a database information way of thinking, knowing we’re going to have to report on this, so we should capture it every time in a structured way.”
A Foundation in Flint
Kurin moved to Flint from Midland to attend Kettering in 2007 and immediately put down roots. He and his wife got married after they graduated from college and are raising their son in Mott Park.
“Flint is the first place where things just felt like home for me,” Kurin said. “This is where our community is, the families that my son has grown up with. There’s something about Flint, where it feels like anything is possible here.”
Kurin has worked as a software and technology consultant and entrepreneur since graduating, including for Tyler Technologies, a company in Troy that provides public sector software solutions to various clients, so he could learn some of the inner workings of tech within the government. It is that feeling he described, that Flint is sort of a playground for people who aren’t afraid to take risks, that is particularly appealing as he expands his new venture.
“There’s the aspect of Flint where it can be a really tough place,” he said. “So it’s kind of interesting to build a business here, because if you can build a business that works in Flint, you can be successful anywhere.”
Kurin currently works on the platform out of 100K Ideas, a nonprofit that helps incubate entrepreneurial ideas and startups and bring them to life. He also noted that Flint has great resources for big ideas thanks to the college campuses, research capabilities, and students in the city.
Although he’s starting with small pilots with Civic OS, he’s also dreaming big. One example: the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been using the same mainframe systems since the 1970s, long past their expected lifespan. But They’ve been difficult to maintain and replace: new parts are increasingly difficult or even impossible to find, experienced technicians who specialize int the highly technical systems have retired, funding hasn’t been set aside for modernization, and other issues have complicated upgrades. Kurin hopes Civic OS can eventually grow to solve societal problems at that grand of a scale by helping non-technical and technical people clearly communicate problems and desired changes to systems.
“With Civic OS, part of it is flexibility, but also the vision for low code software that non-technical people can look at and say, ‘Oh, I understand how it works,’” Kurin said. “Like a shared language between the technical people and the process or subject matter experts.”
For now, though, Kurin is slowly and thoughtfully building capacity with small pilot projects. He’s hoping that by mid-year, he’ll have stress-tested the idea enough and found any bugs in the software with pilot partners to begin taking clients. Once that happens, he hopes to help as many nonprofit organizations as he can who have a need.
“I would absolutely love to work with nonprofits of any size,” Kurin said. “I think the best fit is going to be organizations who have some kind of growth already, they have something established and I like to say that the spreadsheets just aren’t doing it for them anymore because there’s multiple people who need to collaborate in the same spreadsheet or they need to give certain people access to some things, but not access to others or allow a broader set of people to input directly into certain parts.”
More information is available on the Civic OS website. Kurin also plans to show other case studies from his beta testing projects as he completes them and share information on the site as the platform grows and evolves.
“When I decided I wanted to work on something new, something entrepreneurial, it had to be audacious for me,” Kurin said. “So my goal is for Civic OS to be the de facto way that people think about using information and storing information in government, in nonprofits.”
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