Dustin Good
Elgin, Illinois
I’m in my second term on Elgin’s city council, at-large. By day I’m focused on a course authoring system for a competency-based online university. By night I build open-source tools for local governments trying to figure out what to do with AI, which lives at CivicWork.ai. This site is mostly the rest.
What I’m working on
Most of my building time goes to CivicWork.ai, which is open-source AI infrastructure for local government. PolicyAide is the main application, and there’s a growing set of smaller tools and integrations on GitHub. One of those, a 34-tool Coda MCP server, was the first thing I shipped that other people actually got excited about.
A bigger part of what I do these days is just trying to get more local government workers to build things themselves. Most municipalities have someone on staff who could be writing useful internal tools, and most of them have been told for years that software is something you buy from a vendor. That assumption is starting to crack. A friend of mine in another Illinois municipality messaged me this week to say he’d convinced his Village Manager, legal, and IT to let him publish a public-facing web app he vibe-coded, and that “the reality is setting in.” This is the shift we’re going to see more and more of in every industry, including the traditionally slow ones, and local government is the one I’m trying to push on.
Elgin City Council
At-large. Second term, 2021 to present. Resident-funded both runs. Proudly endorsed by the local paper each time, including one editorial that called me “a bit of a wonk in a charming way and tirelessly studious.”
Writing
A few essays, mostly on AI in local government. Read them.
Speaking
I’ve spoken on municipal AI at the Illinois Municipal League and City AI Connect, taught a session on AI and digital governance at UIS’s PAD 501 two years running, and I’ll be presenting at the Municipal Clerks of Illinois Institute & Master Academy in Bloomington this October.