Romulus runs the race. Numa runs the office. And for a while now we’ve been circling the third thing — the one neither of them was built for.
Walk into any town hall and you’ll find it: the counter. A resident reporting a pothole. A contractor filing for a building permit. A records request with a statutory deadline attached. A council agenda due out before Thursday’s meeting. None of that belongs to a campaign, and none of it belongs to one elected official’s office — it belongs to the institution itself, the one that spans terms, officials, and parties, and answers to everyone.
That’s the product we’re building next. Its name is Curia.
Same word, opposite side of the counter
Numa taught us something we didn’t fully appreciate until we shipped it. An officeholder’s casework is advocacy — the office pushing on a resident’s behalf against some agency sitting on a claim. A government’s service request is the mirror image: the agency itself doing the work. Same phone call, opposite side of the counter. Forcing both into one product would flatten a distinction that’s legal, not cosmetic — so, as with Numa before it, the new thing gets its own name, its own roof, and its own database.
Curia is government mode: the software a municipality, county, or state agency runs to serve its public. Service requests and 311. Permits and licensing. Code enforcement. Public-records requests, with the response clock the law actually imposes. Meetings, agendas, and minutes. And — a first for the family — inbound money: fees, fines, and bills as first-class records rather than a spreadsheet next door.
Compliance is the product
Campaign software answers to election law, and office software answers to the no-electioneering line. Government software answers to more law than both put together — records-retention schedules, open-meetings acts, accessibility statutes, payment-card rules. Curia treats that as the point, not the fine print. A records-law deadline won’t look like a to-do item; it looks like a statutory clock, visibly different from an internal goal, and it stops when the law says it stops. Public and internal are unmistakable at a glance, because in a public-records world a staffer must never confuse the two.
The third sibling
Curia keeps the family’s warm-paper editorial bones — the same ledger cream you know from Romulus and Numa — and takes an accent of its own: verdigris, the patina on weathered civic bronze. Campaign owns warm gold, the office owns statute blue, and green was the open lane. It should feel like a well-run clerk’s office in a handsome old municipal building: institutional, trustworthy, unhurried — and pointedly not a cold govtech dashboard. And no, there are no party colors anywhere in it. A government serves everyone.
The name follows Romulus and Numa home to Rome: the curia was the room where governing actually happened. It reads the way the product should — governance, deliberation, the institution at work.
Residents get a front door too: a portal to report, apply, request, and pay in one place — carrying the town’s own seal, never ours.
When
Curia is on the drawing board now — the design is locked, the plan is written, and we’re building through the fall. If your town or agency wants to be early, we’d like to hear from you. And yes — Rosie and Kennedy are getting a sibling. More on that soon.