About CityCounts

CityCounts helps find signal in the noise. Our mission is to empower the democratic process from the citizens up.

I built CityCounts because democracy needs transparency, yet seeing the full record was an impossible job.

All of our historical records are there but it’s a mountain of unstructured data.

The solution is to turn all of that data into an analytics platform for citizens, that’s CityCounts.com.

City council, at a glance. 75 seconds.

Why: Built to give Nanaimo a non-partisan, simple view of the record, so residents can see for themselves and make up their own minds.
Who built it: I’m Ben Odynski, a product leader and technologist who moved to Nanaimo about five years ago. I create products that turn messy data into something clear. I spent six years doing this at Indeed, leading product teams across orgs including JobSeeker, Employer and internal teams such as ops, sales, and CS. Before that I ran SEO and growth engineering at Resume.com.
Independence: CityCounts is a politically neutral platform and operates independently with no sponsors and no affiliation with the City of Nanaimo, any political candidates, or the Nanaimo Prosperity Corporation (where Ben serves on the board).
Where the records come from: Voting records are pulled from official city files, and quotes come from automated meeting video captions. Coverage is partial. CityCounts cannot guarantee the accuracy of the records we receive, or of our own data processing and categorization. When in doubt, watch the video clip and read the source documents.
Contact: Questions or corrections: hello@citycounts.com.