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☼Boulder Lens

About the Data

Boulder Lens is an independent, informational tool built on City of Boulder open data. It lets anyone drop a pin in Boulder and see public records nearby — calls for service, offenses, stolen bikes, parks and recreation properties, and more.

Who’s behind this

Boulder Lens is built and maintained by one person, not a company. It started as a simple idea: give Boulder residents and visitors an honest, ad-free view of what’s happening around town, built on public data instead of guesswork. There’s no ad model, and nothing here is sold. Support or sponsorship options may open up down the road — for now, the best way to help is flagging anything that’s wrong (see below).

What this is

  • A neutral way to browse public records by location and time.
  • Powered by official open-data feeds published by the City of Boulder.
  • Built to be readable, accessible, and a little bit groovy.

What this is not

  • Not an emergency or dispatch tool. Call 911 in an emergency.
  • Not an official City of Boulder application.
  • Not real-time. Open data is generalized and updated after publication.
  • Not a measure of how "safe" or "unsafe" any area is.

How places get on the map

Every place on Boulder Lens is hand-reviewed against the same published standard before it appears. The short version: it has to be somewhere you do something — a visit, a hangout, an experience — not a service you book or a treatment you receive. It has to be describable without health claims, open to walk-ins, and independently verifiable: a real website, stable hours, a physical Boulder location. We favor distinctly Boulder spots that locals come back to — the best one or three of their kind, not a complete directory. Medical providers, appointment-only services, supplement and vape shops, and franchise chains aren’t listed. And inclusion can’t be bought: no fee ever creates, preserves, or promotes a listing. Think a place belongs here? Suggest it through the below — it goes into the same review queue as everything else.

Boulder Essentials

City & Safety also includes Boulder Essentials — a small, hand-verified set of official links for common civic tasks (renewing vehicle registration, registering to vote, parking permits, hard-to-recycle drop-off, post office tasks), with map pins for the offices, kiosks, and facilities you’d actually visit. Every link points to the official government or nonprofit page and is re-checked quarterly; Boulder Lens is not affiliated with any agency. Open City & Safety to browse it.

What's in the app today

  • Civic & Public Records layers — use a past-looking Records Window (Last 7 / 30 / 60 days or Custom).
  • Places & Recreation layers — Parks & Recreation Properties (more places coming).
  • Events & Markets layers — use a forward-looking Events Window (Today, This Weekend, Next 7 / 30 days, or Custom).
  • Boulder County Arts Events — pulled from the public BCAA RSS feed when available; only mapped when a venue can be safely identified.
  • Boulder Farmers Market — recurring static schedule and location from the official Boulder County Farmers Markets page.
  • CU Boulder Events — pulled from CU Boulder's official public Localist calendar API (Social & Community Engagement events only).
  • Dairy Arts Center — pulled from the Dairy's official public events API.
  • Concerts (Boulder Theater, Fox, Chautauqua) — ticketed concert listings pulled from Z2 Entertainment's public events page for its three Boulder venues.
  • Roots Music Project — live music, open mics, and workshops pulled from the venue's public event listings. Start times are converted to Mountain Time, because the venue's page publishes them in UTC to browsers that have not yet run its scripts.
  • Trident Booksellers & Cafe — author talks, live music, open mics, film nights, and the language exchange, read from the shop’s own public events page. That page can be served from a cache, so we ask for a fresh copy once a day and hide the layer entirely if what comes back is out of date rather than show you a calendar that has already happened.
  • Venue Programming — recurring events listed at a venue’s own request, entered by hand from the venue’s published schedule and re-checked by a person. Not scraped, and not a feed: a small, deliberately short list. If you run a Boulder venue and want your regular nights here, say so through the feedback link and it goes into the same review queue as everything else.

A note on events

  • This app does not crawl the web for events or guess event addresses.
  • Every event comes from a named source listed on the Sources page — official APIs and feeds, plus a few venues’ own public event pages read directly.
  • Event pins only appear when a source provides a venue/address we can safely identify.
  • Other events still appear as cards with links to the official source.
  • Always verify event details with the official organizer before you go.

Data freshness

Civic records marked Official show the latest available from the official public source. Some datasets may lag 24–48 hours and may be incomplete, delayed, generalized, redacted, or revised after publication. This is not a real-time or live-dispatch feed. Always verify details against the official source linked on each record card.

Data sources note

Civic record layers (calls for service, offenses, crashes, stolen bikes, and more) connect to official City of Boulder open-data feeds where available and are labeled Official. A few layers remain Sample while live feeds are being connected. Events come from approved public calendars (BCAA RSS, Boulder Farmers Market schedule). Civic records are normalized through CityDataPoint and events through EventDataPoint, so a new feed of either kind can be added without UI changes. Curated places are a separate, hand-reviewed catalog with its own shape (PlaceRecord) — they aren’t a feed, and they don’t pass through either.

Privacy, briefly

Boulder Lens doesn’t require an account, doesn’t use advertising trackers, doesn’t build a profile of you, and doesn’t follow you across other sites. For a rough sense of how many people visit and which pages get used, we use Cloudflare Web Analytics — aggregate counts only, no cookies, no personal profiles, nothing that can identify you. If you turn on event notifications, your browser’s push subscription (not your identity) is stored so notifications can be delivered; you can turn this off anytime. Nothing collected here is sold or shared with advertisers. Full details, including feedback-form data and every third-party service involved: see the Privacy Policy.

See something wrong?

Places and events on Boulder Lens are individually reviewed, but things change — a spot closes, an address is off, a link is dead. Every listing has a 🚩 Report Issue button, or you can any time. Corrections are usually the fastest way to keep this useful for everyone.