What’s new at CivStart

Several fixes to peer connections that add up to results you can actually read.

• No more duplicates. The same government could appear twice in one set of results, and some challenges returned only a single peer when more existed.
• Summaries are formatted. Challenge summaries were rendering their raw markup, so headings and lists arrived as literal asterisks and pound signs.
• More vendor matches. The matching criteria were tight enough that relevant vendors were being left out of results entirely.
• A way to get there. Once you finish a deep dive and share it, there is now a button that takes you straight to peer connections for that challenge, instead of leaving you to find your way back.

There is now a microphone button in the discovery message box. Press it and speak, and what you say becomes text in the field, which you can edit before sending.

The hardest part of discovery is the very first step: describing a messy problem in your own words, from a blank box. Talking through it is easier than typing it, particularly on a phone.

If your browser does not support speech input, or you decline the microphone permission, the button stays out of the way and typing works exactly as before.

When discovery asks where you work, it now gives you a bounded way to answer instead of an open prompt that silently expected one specific format.

The old question read as free text but required a standardized city and state, so reasonable answers were rejected with no indication of what it wanted. Consolidated city-counties had no correct answer to give at all.

• The government portal is called the Clarity Portal throughout. An internal working name had escaped onto real screens.
• Product screenshots on the website now get the same treatment on mobile as on desktop, so they read as screenshots rather than as live interface you can tap.

You can export your challenge reports as a PDF or a Word document and take them out of the app.

This was the most common request from the people who get the most out of Clarity: the work is useful precisely when it reaches someone who was not in the session. A director, a council packet, a budget request. Until now the only way to do that was to copy text out of the browser.

Both formats keep the report's structure and formatting, so it arrives looking like a document rather than a transcript.

If you have already been through onboarding, creating an organization now starts prefilled with what you told us: your government's name, state, and type. You can change any of it before saving.

Consolidated city-county is also now a government type you can pick, in both onboarding and organization creation. Consolidated governments like Nashville-Davidson and Louisville-Jefferson are a real and distinct structure, and until now there was no accurate option for them.