Justin Auciello
I design and operate civic signal systems: two-way information networks that help communities, institutions, and decision-makers turn distributed observation into shared understanding.My foundation is planning. For more than 20 years, I have worked as a New Jersey licensed planner in land use, redevelopment, housing, resilience, public process, and municipal governance. That work has taught me that public decisions do not succeed on technical analysis alone. They depend on trust, timing, public understanding, and the quality of the information environment around the decision.For the past 15 years, I have built, operated, and studied those information environments directly. In 2011, I founded Jersey Shore Hurricane News, a pioneering community-powered information network that grew into one of New Jersey’s largest trusted civic information platforms. In both everyday civic life and crisis, including Superstorm Sandy and many events since, JSHN has helped communities navigate uncertainty, share local conditions, and make practical decisions through verified, useful, two-way public information.That work led to seven years of reporting for WHYY on coastal resilience, climate risk, recovery, infrastructure, and public policy; recognition as a White House Champion of Change; and three years of humanitarian information work in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria. There, I designed and field-led Información Como Ayuda, a two-way humanitarian information system launched in a severely degraded communications environment that reached more than one million people.I later served as Global Information Ecosystems Advisor at Internews, supporting information ecosystem assessments and programmatic responses across Latin America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.Across this arc, I have worked at the intersection of planning systems and information systems: 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.The through-line is simple: information is infrastructure. Trust is architecture. Tone is engineering.Today, I help communities, public agencies, planners, news organizations, and civic institutions understand how information moves, how trust is built, and how civic signal systems can strengthen resilience, public decision-making, engagement, and collective situational awareness.