The city
Lithonia, Georgia is a small city in DeKalb County, about 18 miles east of Atlanta. It's majority-Black, predominantly working class, and part of one of the most culturally significant metro areas in the country. It has elected Black leadership, active civic participation, and a community that genuinely cares about the place they live.
It also had civic digital infrastructure, a city website, a Facebook page, a hodgepodge of announcements across different platforms, that didn't reflect any of that. Finding out about a city council meeting required knowing where to look. Getting information about city services required calling the right number on the right day. Community events were promoted through word of mouth or individual social accounts, not through any unified channel.
What MyLithonia is
MyLithonia is a civic platform, part city portal, part community hub, that puts everything residents need in one place:
- Events calendar. Community events, city meetings, local business events, curated and searchable in one feed. No more digging through three different Facebook groups.
- City services directory. What's available, how to access it, who to contact. Searchable and kept current.
- Local government transparency. City council agendas, meeting minutes, public notices, surfaced and organized so a resident doesn't need a FOIA request to know what's happening.
- Community data. Local business listings, neighborhood resources, civic organization directory.
- News and announcements. Verified local news and city announcements in one feed, separate from the noise of general social media.
Why this is a tech equity project
Cities with larger tax bases and wealthier populations have sophisticated digital civic infrastructure, apps, portals, integrated service platforms. Small cities, especially majority-Black cities with constrained budgets, get what they can afford, which is often not much.
MyLithonia inverts that. It applies the same design and engineering quality to a small Black-led city that Silicon Valley applies to enterprise municipal contracts. The city residents experience the product, not the budget constraint.
Every city deserves civic software that reflects the people who live there. Not just the cities with the biggest contracts.
The model, and why it matters beyond Lithonia
MyLithonia is designed as a template. The underlying platform can be configured for any municipality. The goal is to make it easy for community technologists to stand up a MyCity product for their own city, without needing to build from scratch or navigate a slow government procurement process.
If you're in a Black-led city and want to talk about a version for your community, reach out.