Community S2 is the intelligence layer for emergency preparedness and community security. Sign up. Enter your county. Your Area Study starts building itself.
You want to be informed, but there's so much information. And it's in a hundred different places. No one has time to check them all, much less stay on top of everything else that's happening in the world.
We've gathered it into one place. Updated through the day.
Travis County Sheriff's Office Alert: Scroll for details…
Friday. Meet downtown. Wear a mask.
Thu: thunderstorms, 95% chance.
Flood siren pilot debated…
Commissioners Court agenda (PDF), Oct 6.
New crime data in your area.
Hazard Risk Profile: relatively high.
Wire view from the product · Travis County, TX · 29–30 Sep 2026
"Not having local intelligence in an emergency is like buying a house you've never inspected." — AREA INTELLIGENCE HANDBOOK V2 · 1-2
Travis County ranks in the 98th percentile nationally for flooding, but your specific neighborhood has a moderate risk due to its terrain features. Hail and tornados topped the list.
Your neighborhood's ranking, not just the county average.
National Risk Index hazard profiles
NWS alerts, the 7-day forecast, and drought conditions
Organized around the questions you're already asking.
Life support systems like power and water, and their current status.
Drought index, past 12 months.
12 activist and militant groups in your area.
Local government and political meetings.
Your districts and every deadline.
Sources provided for all news and data so you can investigate.
Local reporting, alerts, and calendars update through the day.
Have access to local information when you need it.
"I'm active in local politics and organizing for the issues I care about. I needed a local intelligence dashboard to keep me briefed on the things I wanted to know. So I hired Rob and we built one."
Mike Shelby - Austin, Texas - Founder & CEO, Forward ObserverExport the news and data layers that we provide into an Area Study you can save offline.
Permissive environment. Severe drought and an active flood watch. Hail and tornado rank highest in the AO.
For more than a decade, Forward Observer has been your source for national and global intelligence. Through the unrest in 2016 through 2020, COVID, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war in Iran, and whatever comes next, the question I get most often is: "What does this mean for my area?"
There are 3,144 counties in this country. Our small intel team didn't have the bandwidth to cover them, so I wrote the Area Intelligence Handbook and taught people to do it themselves.
The future is uncertain. Many of us are watching 2027, and the 2028 election year after that. There's so much focus on what's happening in China or Taiwan, or Russia or Ukraine, or Washington, D.C., but when a disaster affects you directly, it's always local. And you may face a man-made disaster in the future.
So we built Community S2, county by county, to produce the same kind of intelligence the Forward Observer team produces at the national level, but pointed at where you live.
The time to build your local picture is now, while things are relatively calm. Use your dashboard to map out the local political landscape, stay on top of activist and militant groups in the area, and plan for the hazards that will impact your neighborhood. Then, when you have a mission, you'll have the intelligence to drive it.
Get access to your county dashboard, along with neighborhood-specific information, news, weather, civic meetings, and scheduled protests
Less than 70 cents a day.
The Clearer Picture Guarantee. If you don't have a clearer picture of your county within 30 days, get a full refund.
We've already built out dashboards for the top 200 most populated counties, and are adding to that number every day. If your county isn't built out by the time you sign up, it will be the next in line.
Most news is free, but your time isn't. CS2 pulls together dozens, sometimes hundreds of news and data sources for your area, and organizes it by layer, so you get the information you need and get back to your life.
No, however, you should use a nearby address so you get the right census tract. It stays private to your account.
CS2 does the slow part of finding and organizing what's happening in your county. In the near future, our system can alert you to significant developments. We can't explain exactly how it will affect you, but we can teach you how to do that.
No. CS2 is a separate product for your county. Your membership doesn't change.
Not currently, however, as soon as we have 1,500 county dashboards built out, we'll introduce a monthly membership option.
That's Special Projects. We'll open enrollment back up soon.