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Launching in Charlottesville, VA
Your community's data,
finally making sense
Polis unifies public data across education, public safety, health, and economic mobility — then lets you ask questions in plain language and get real answers.
You're on the list — we'll be in touch.
Free tier available at launch. No credit card required.
Who it's for
Built for the people who care most
Whether you run a city department or just want to understand your neighborhood better.
Local Governments
Cross-agency visibility, early-warning indicators, and outcome-driven planning — without hiring a data team.
"Show me which neighborhoods saw the biggest change in school enrollment and crime this year."
Nonprofits & Foundations
Defensible impact measurement, data-informed program design, and stronger storytelling for boards and funders.
"How do health outcomes compare in the communities where we operate versus the state average?"
Residents & Advocates
Explore your community with the same data city hall uses — translated into language anyone can understand.
"What's the relationship between SRO presence and school suspension rates in Charlottesville?"
See it work
Ask a question. Get a real answer.
Polis connects data across systems so you can explore patterns that were previously invisible.
polis.community
How have school environment indicators in Charlottesville changed alongside public safety trends over the past 5 years?
Short-term suspensions in Charlottesville City Schools declined 34% between 2019 and 2024, with the sharpest drop during the 2020-21 school year. During the same period, crime incidents in school-adjacent neighborhoods fell 18%.
Schools that adopted restorative justice programs saw suspension rates drop 2.4x faster than the district average, while their surrounding neighborhoods showed a 12% greater reduction in juvenile-involved incidents.
VDOE School Environment
Charlottesville PD Incidents
Census Demographics
Data coverage
Six domains. One connected view.
We ingest, standardize, and connect public datasets that are normally siloed across dozens of agencies.
Education
Accreditation, assessments, enrollment, school finance, and school environment data from the Virginia DOE.
Public Safety
Crime incidents, arrests, fire calls, and neighborhood boundaries from Charlottesville Open Data.
Health
125+ datasets from the Virginia Department of Health covering communicable disease, vital statistics, and more.
Economic Mobility
Labor force, unemployment, payroll from BLS and income, poverty, and employment from Census ACS.
Elections
Virginia election results from 2000 to 2024 — every race, candidate, and vote count, fully structured.
Congress
Bills, votes, members, hearings, and committee activity spanning the 113th through 119th Congress.
Pricing
Start free. Scale when you're ready.
Be first to see Polis in action
We're launching in Charlottesville first. Join the waitlist to get early access and help shape the platform.
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Tell us a little more and we'll prioritize the data and the cities our
earliest users actually need. All optional.
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Polis — Connecting communities to intelligence they deserve. · Charlottesville, VA · 2026
Help Shape Polis
We analyze chat logs to identify data coverage gaps — but your direct input is invaluable. Tell us what data matters most to you so we can prioritize what we build next.
Polis grows with its community. Every response here directly informs our data roadmap, geographic expansion, and feature priorities. Select as many options as apply — or write in your own.
Thank you for shaping Polis.
Your feedback has been recorded and will directly inform our data roadmap and feature priorities.
About Polis
Connecting communities to intelligence they deserve.
Why "Polis"
polis
/ˈpälis/
Greek — "city" or "city-state"
The root of policy, politics, and metropolis. One word that instantly signals civic purpose without being heavy-handed. We chose it because the platform exists at the intersection of data and public life — turning scattered city records into something every resident, policymaker, and researcher can actually use.
The Problem
Public data is technically “public,” but practically inaccessible.
It sits in fragmented systems, disconnected portals, buried in spreadsheets, and locked behind technical barriers that most residents, advocates, and even city staff can't navigate. The people most affected by public decisions — and the people making them — rarely have a way to answer basic questions about their own community without weeks of manual work. The result: decisions get made on instinct, anecdote, or the loudest voice in the room, while the data that should inform them sits unused.
Our Mission
Make public data usable for the people it's supposed to serve.
Polis connects siloed datasets into a single platform and lets anyone ask questions in plain language — returning real, sourced answers instead of guesswork. When a community's own data becomes genuinely accessible, better decisions follow.
Our Vision
A world where every community has the intelligence to shape its own future.
We're starting in Charlottesville, then scaling across Virginia and beyond. As we add more geographies and more data domains, the questions people can answer grow exponentially. The long-term vision is a national (maybe international) civic data platform where cross-domain, cross-regional insight is available to everyone — from a council member preparing for a vote, to a nonprofit writing a grant, to a parent choosing a school. Public data should produce public intelligence.
Team
The people building Polis.
Ckalib Nelson
Founder
Building Polis to make public data genuinely accessible to the communities it's meant to serve. Based in Charlottesville, VA.
Why I'm building Polis
In February 2025, the University of Virginia went into lockdown twice in a single week. I remember thinking that didn't sound right — statistically, weeks like that shouldn't happen often. I wanted to understand how those days fit into the bigger picture of safety in Charlottesville, and I couldn't find a single tool that would tell me. So I found the data myself and built one.
That became the Charlottesville Crime Dashboard. I almost didn't publish it — crime is a sensitive subject, and the data behind it is sensitive too. But I decided the most useful thing I could do was put the tool in people's hands and be honest about why I made it. I wasn't trying to assign blame. I wanted us to see clearly, and maybe build a little more empathy along the way.
The dashboard answered questions about one corner of public life. But the more I used it, the more I kept asking: why stop at public safety? The same problem shows up in education, in health, in housing — the data exists, it's technically public, and almost no one can actually use it. When Charlottesville Tomorrow asked what I hoped to see in the next twenty years, that's what I talked about: data that works for all of us, across every domain, and makes it easier not just to understand our problems but to act on them.
I've been a builder since I was a kid fixing my grandmother's computer, and I'm an engineer by trade — but this was never really about the technology. I moved to Charlottesville in 2015, and it's home now. I mentor kids in STEM, and I've served communities through local boards in business and the arts. I've seen how much stronger a place gets when its people can see themselves clearly and decide together. I believe everyone has a skill that can help solve our shared problems. This is mine.
In early 2026, I finally had time to build the thing I'd been circling for years — not one dashboard for one issue, but a single place where anyone can ask a real question about their community and get a real, sourced answer. That's Polis. It's why I think getting this right matters for whether our communities simply function, or actually thrive.
— Ckalib Nelson, Founder
As featured in Charlottesville Tomorrow
How It Works
This agent doesn't guess. It queries real city databases in real time and shows you exactly where the answer came from.
You ask a plain-English question
"What's the poverty rate in Charlottesville?"
The agent interprets intent and picks the right data domain
Claude identifies this as an economic mobility question and routes to the Census ACS data in our Athena data lake.
A real SQL query runs against the actual dataset
No pre-written answers. The agent generates and executes a live Athena SQL query scoped to the right tables, filters, and time range.
You get a sourced, structured answer with data notes
The response includes the actual numbers, the years covered, suppression flags for small samples, and which tables were queried.
What makes this different
Grounded in authoritative sources
Every answer comes from live queries against data published by the most reputable public institutions — the U.S. Census Bureau, Virginia DOE, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and local open data portals. No training data, no guesswork.
Transparent sourcing, honest about uncertainty
Every response cites which dataset was queried, what years it covers, and the source agency. When sample sizes are small or values are suppressed, the agent flags it — it never fills gaps with assumptions.
Cross-domain joins
Ask questions that span datasets — "Do neighborhoods with higher property values have fewer parking violations?" — and the engine correlates across domains automatically, surfacing patterns that siloed tools can't.
Responsible AI
Polis uses AI to make data accessible, not to replace human judgment. Here's how we keep it honest.
Data-grounded, fully attributed
The AI doesn't generate facts from its training set. Every answer is grounded in a live query against actual public records, and every response cites the source agency, dataset, and time period. You can verify every claim independently.
Privacy-first, uncertainty-aware
Polis only queries aggregate public datasets — no personally identifiable information is accessed, stored, or processed. When data has gaps, small sample sizes, or suppressed values, the agent flags it explicitly rather than filling in assumptions.
Informs decisions, never makes them
The platform presents data and context to support human judgment — it doesn't make policy recommendations, score communities, or rank outcomes. Every interaction produces an auditable trace of which queries ran and how the response was assembled.
Partnership
We partner with organizations that publish or maintain civic data — bringing it into a platform where it becomes instantly queryable alongside every other city dataset.
Data Partner Track
Your organization publishes or maintains data with civic value — school metrics, transit feeds,
utility records, health outcomes, housing data. Under our Data Partner institutional plan, we
ingest your data into our platform so it becomes queryable alongside every other city dataset,
instantly accessible to researchers, policymakers, and the public. We handle schema normalization,
build automated refresh pipelines, and keep your data current — with full attribution on every
query result.
What's included
Schema mapping & normalization
Automated refresh pipelines
Data quality monitoring
Attribution & source branding
Public impact reporting
Dedicated onboarding & support
Ideal Data Partners
GTFS feeds, ridership data, route schedules
Real-time and historical transit data that helps residents, planners, and researchers understand mobility patterns across the city.
Performance metrics, enrollment, demographics
Education data that empowers parents, policymakers, and advocates to track outcomes and allocate resources where they matter most.
Government portals, civic tech organizations
Any entity that maintains public datasets with civic value — from utility records to health outcomes — and wants that data to reach a wider audience.
Account
Your profile, usage, saved conversations, and settings.
History
| Month | Data queries | Usage charge |
|---|
Once paid plans begin, your subscription is billed at the start of each month, and the previous month's queries beyond your plan's included queries are added to that bill. Only answers that ran a data query count; greetings and “I don't have that data” answers are free. Months follow Eastern time.
Saved conversations
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Saved to your account, so they appear on every device you sign in on. A conversation is deleted automatically 540 days after it was last updated.
Delete all history
Deletes every saved conversation and project from your account and from this device. This cannot be undone.
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Sessions
Signing out everywhere ends your session on every device, including this one.
Delete account
Deletes your login and every saved conversation and project. Your monthly usage totals are kept as billing records, as described in the Privacy Policy. This cannot be undone.
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