About this project
Moon Township publishes a great deal about itself. Very little of it is easy to read.
Moon Pulse is an attempt to fix that: an ongoing research project that collects what the township, the county, the state and the school district already publish, and turns it into something a resident can actually use.
What this is for
Nearly everything here already exists somewhere public. Agendas and minutes sit in a meeting portal. Crash records, test scores, police activity reports and campaign finance filings sit in state and federal systems. All of it is technically available and almost none of it is genuinely accessible — it is spread across a dozen sites, published as scanned PDFs, and written for people who already know how the process works.
The goal is straightforward: make information from and about Moon Township easier to get, so that residents can take a fuller part in local government, find out what is happening before it has happened, and enjoy more of what the township has to offer. A person should be able to learn what their board is deciding without setting aside an evening to find out.
Who makes it
The reporting and the software behind it are the work of one person: Nick, a Moon Township resident. Moon Pulse is published by 3D PGH LLC, a small Pittsburgh-area company he runs — which is simply the entity that owns the domain and pays the hosting bill, not a newsroom with staff.
What that company is not is worth saying plainly. It is not a political organisation or a campaign. It has no affiliation with the Township, the school district, the library, or any authority, board or committee written about on this site, and no business before any of them. Nothing here is sponsored, nobody pays for coverage or placement, and there is no advertising.
It is also, honestly, still a research project. It is a working experiment in whether a single resident with good tools can produce local coverage that is genuinely useful. Some parts are further along than others.
How it is made
Documents are collected automatically from the sources that publish them, stored in a database, and then read — by software and by a person — to find what matters. Every figure and quotation on this site is checked against the original document before it is published, and every claim is dated to the meeting or record it came from so anyone can go and look for themselves.
This site uses artificial intelligence in its research and drafting. AI is good at reading thousands of pages quickly and terrible at getting names, numbers and outcomes reliably right — it will confidently invent a plausible spelling or expand an acronym it has never seen. So nothing is published on the strength of a machine reading alone. Names, figures, votes and quotations are verified against the source record by a human before anything goes up, and where the record does not answer a question, this site says so instead of guessing.
What this is not
- Not the official record. The township's own agendas, minutes and packets are the authority. If this site and an official document disagree, the official document is right and this site has a mistake to fix.
- Not complete. Minutes are only published after the board approves them, usually about a month later, and some meetings are documented far more thinly than others. Gaps in the record are noted where they matter.
- Not a crime report. What the police department publishes is monthly activity data. It is described here as police activity, never as a crime rate.
- Not personal information. Public documents sometimes print residents' home addresses. Those are left out of anything published here.
Corrections
Getting something wrong is the failure that matters most for a project like this, and corrections are welcome from anyone — residents, officials, staff, or the subject of a story. Point at the sentence and, if you can, the document that contradicts it. Anything that turns out to be wrong gets fixed on the page, with a note saying what changed.
A contact address is being set up and will be published here. Until then this page is a description of the project, not an invitation to write to it.
Moon Pulse covers Moon Township, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and is published by 3D PGH LLC. Sources include the Township's CivicClerk meeting portal and BoardDocs archive, the Moon Area School District, the Moon Township Public Library board, PennDOT and Pennsylvania open data, the Federal Election Commission, and Allegheny County records — all of them public.