Amy Barthelemy
Founder, GovParti | Civic Technology Researcher
San Angelo, Texas, United States
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Amy Barthelemy is the solo founder of GovParti (govparti.org), a free civic intelligence platform covering all 3,127 US counties. The platform stores data from almost 50 federal sources locally, functioning as a living civic archive resilient to federal data removal. She is a published researcher (SSRN: 10928268), Latina first-generation American, military spouse, and mom.
Area of Expertise
Topics
What One Developer Can Build
What can one developer actually build with modern AI tools, an open source stack, and a clear problem to solve? GovParti is a free civic intelligence platform covering all 3,127 US counties, built solo using PostgreSQL, Drizzle ORM, React Native, Node.js, and GPT-4o-mini.
This session is a practical walkthrough of what it actually takes to build AI-powered infrastructure at scale without a team, without enterprise tooling, and without a large budget. We will cover the architecture decisions that made it possible, the AI integration that powers county-level civic briefings for every community in America, and the data resilience design that keeps the platform running even when federal data sources go offline.
The central lesson is not about civic tech. It is about what AI tools make possible right now for solo builders and small IT teams who are willing to think at scale. If you have been wondering what you could actually ship with the tools available today, this session is for you.
Trust, but Validate: The Pipeline Doesn't End at Ingestion
Most engineering effort goes into getting data in, and once the rows land, we trust them. This talk is about everything that happens after that, and why the post-write layer is where correctness actually gets decided. The case study is GovParti, a civic data platform covering all 3,127 U.S. counties, built solo with no team to catch mistakes downstream, so governance had to be engineered into the schema and storage rather than enforced by process.
The core idea is that every value carries its lineage at write time. A provenance record holds the verbatim upstream bytes next to the value, so a number never has to be refetched and survives a source going dark or changing underneath it. This is what makes data debuggable at all: when a number moves, you cannot tell your own ingestion bug apart from a genuine upstream revision unless you still hold what you ingested last time, and both wrong guesses corrupt your data in opposite directions. The source's own methodology is cached alongside the value too, because a number is only as defensible as the method behind it, and because two valid sources can contradict each other by definition rather than by value.
The talk closes on a hard lesson. A post-write quality layer, agents that judge each value against the national distribution, its own state, and the county's own history, was built, deployed, and then paused on purpose. Auditing the flagship checker, I found it was silently failing most of its core statistical tests, a type mismatch that made the database quietly return nothing rather than error. A validation agent that fails silently is worse than none, because it manufactures confidence you didn't earn. Validation is just another source, and it lies too.
The County You Didn't Audit: How Civic Infrastructure Gaps Create Critical Vulnerability at Scale
When a 600MW data center is proposed for a county with confirmed PFAS water contamination, no community impact assessment requirement, and a $400 million infrastructure gap, the question is not whether the facility is secure. The question is whether the community surrounding it can sustain it.
This session presents findings from GovParti, a civic intelligence platform that analyzed 3,127 U.S. counties across health, housing, environmental, legal, and economic indicators to produce a composite civic health score for every county in the country. The data reveals a pattern that security professionals rarely see on their dashboards: the counties attracting the largest critical infrastructure investments are often the least equipped to support them.
Using real county-level data, this talk will cover:
- How water system violations, workforce gaps, and regulatory blind spots create physical supply chain risk for facilities sited in under-resourced communities
- A case study of a proposed hyperscale data center in West Texas, where PFAS contamination, military base proximity, and absent state-level siting requirements converge
- How Texas SB 6 addressed grid-level cost allocation for large loads but left community-level resilience entirely unregulated
- What the EPA UCMR5 data, TCEQ enforcement records, and county-level health rankings reveal about the environments where critical digital infrastructure is being built
- A framework for evaluating civic readiness as a factor in infrastructure siting risk
While the primary case study is drawn from West Texas, the framework and underlying data cover all 3,127 U.S. counties, with direct applicability to data center siting decisions across the Southeast and nationally.
Attendees will leave with a concrete understanding of how to assess the non-cyber risk surface of critical infrastructure: the water, power, governance, and community capacity layers that determine whether a facility can operate reliably over its full lifecycle.
SpiceWorld 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
2026 Secure Carolinas Conference Sessionize Event Upcoming
ACM Irving Tech Talk July 2026 (In-Person) Sessionize Event
Amy Barthelemy
Founder, GovParti | Civic Technology Researcher
San Angelo, Texas, United States
Actions
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