Ghost Bureau

Inspired by the 'Industrial Production' scraper's ability to gather vast amounts of data, 'Neuromancer's' exploration of hidden digital underbellies, and 'The Prestige's' focus on unveiling secrets and mastering complex systems, Ghost Bureau aims to digitize and organize obscure, often overlooked, municipal records. Think old zoning permits, historical infrastructure plans, forgotten bylaws, and even analog public meeting minutes. These documents, often stored in physical archives or inaccessible digital formats, hold immense value for urban planners, historical societies, researchers, and even curious citizens. The project would involve developing a niche web scraper that can access and parse a variety of legacy digital formats, and potentially a system for digitizing and OCR-ing scanned physical documents. The core functionality would be a user-friendly search engine that allows for queries across this digitized archive. This is niche because most municipal software focuses on current operations, not deep historical dives. It's low-cost as it primarily utilizes open-source scraping tools and cloud storage. The high earning potential comes from offering premium access to researchers, developers building historical context into applications, and municipalities themselves who need to understand their own past to inform future decisions. Imagine a developer building an app to visualize historical neighborhood changes, or a city council needing to prove the historical precedent for a certain urban development decision – Ghost Bureau provides that missing data layer. It's about bringing the hidden 'production' of municipal history to light, like a magician revealing the unseen mechanics of their trick.