Justin Auciello
I build and operate civic signal systems, two-way networks designed around helping people and institutions make sense of uncertain, contested, or fast-changing conditions.This work grows out of a lifelong fascination with online communities. In 2009, I began articulating what would become this framework, recognizing legacy media’s decline and the emergence of citizen-powered information, and exploring how hyperlocal news, technology, and community planning could become systems that help people orient, respond, and act.My foundation is planning. For 20 years, I have worked as a New Jersey licensed planner. I convert complex land use and regulatory problems into defensible planning positions that clients, attorneys, boards, agencies, and courts can rely on.In 2011, I founded Jersey Shore Hurricane News to build a community-powered information network that helped people share local conditions, verify information, and understand what to do next. In routine conditions and crises, including Superstorm Sandy and the pandemic, JSHN operated as a trusted civic signal system: gathering local reports, verifying conditions, correcting rumors, routing needs, and helping residents, officials, and responders understand what was happening and what required action.That work led to seven years of WHYY reporting on coastal resilience, public policy, and more. It also brought recognition from the White House as a Champion of Change. After Hurricane Maria, I carried the same approach into humanitarian information work in Puerto Rico. I designed and field-led Información Como Ayuda for three years, a two-way system launched in a degraded communications environment that reached more than one million people.I later served as Global Information Ecosystems Advisor at Internews, supporting assessments and program design across five continents.Across this arc, I have worked at the intersection of planning systems and information systems, moving between the hearing room and the comment thread, the master plan and the rumor cycle, the redevelopment ordinance and the community information gap, the expert report and the public narrative.In each setting, the work is similar. I assemble facts, detect patterns, test claims, build trust, and produce positions that can withstand scrutiny. The goal is better public judgment, with clearer facts, stronger trust, and decisions that communities and institutions can act on together.I am now codifying the principles, methods, and design patterns behind civic signal systems, translating practice into a framework others can build on.