Civic systems
Small cities are rewriting the playbook for public data
Five municipalities found that useful digital services begin with better questions, not bigger platforms.
Lead briefing Systems & society
The quiet infrastructure shaping the next decade
From neighborhood batteries to open transit data, the most consequential technology is moving out of sight—and into the routines of everyday life.
Read the morning analysisThe daily file
Today at Northstar
Original reporting on technology, climate, cities, and the people designing what comes next.
Climate desk
The rooftops becoming a city’s second power grid
A field report from the cooperatives making shared solar feel ordinary.
Work & culture
What teams learn when the dashboard goes dark
Three studios paused their productivity trackers for a month. The surprising result was not less work, but better conversations about it.
Signals
A night train, a repair café, and other reasons for optimism
Seven small changes that reveal where policy and public imagination are moving together.
The long view
Progress is rarely a straight line. That is what makes it worth mapping.
Our quarterly project follows twelve indicators that sit beneath the loudest headlines: repair time, shade access, household energy resilience, and more.
Explore the signal index- Urban shade coverage
- +8.2points since 2022
- Average repair time
- −17hours since 2024
- Open-data reuse
- 3.1×across pilot cities
Northstar explainer
A practical guide to the public-interest technology stack
The phrase sounds abstract. The ingredients are not: identity, payments, records, and consent. Here is how they fit together—and where the hard choices begin.
Think of public digital infrastructure as a set of reusable building blocks. Done carefully, it lets local teams solve specific problems without rebuilding the foundation each time.
The strongest systems make accountability visible. They show who can access data, how decisions are appealed, and what happens when the network fails.