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How can I contribute to Jurisdictional?


The goal of Jurisdictional is to provide a unified, citizen-centric interface for government. We do this by curating public data and providing software tools to provide a more coherent civic experience. If you're interested in this project, please consider participating. There are many ways to contribute.


Start using Jurisdictional

Jurisdictional encourages each user to add, update, request, and share data.

Each entity data record is composed of many data fields. Every piece of data has a source and an author and an approval workflow. Contributors can earn satoshis (BSV) by contributing public data.

Data records can also be claimed by individuals. Claim preferences are given to official public staff, typically indicated by a formal jurisidictional email address, like .gov). If an entity is not claimed, anybody can claim it. If a public user (not a Staff member) claims an Entity, the Claim of a User who is Public Staff takes precendence over a normal User's Claim. However, User contributions are still retained. And, a User can flag an Entity claimed by a Public Staffer that is out-of-date. Users can contribute the missing data, receiving credit for it if the Public Staffer accepts or subsequently adds the proposed data contribution.


Repeatable tasks

Jurisdictional is an open directory of public entities. But the data inventory is vast, spanning 50 states and a federation of more than 90,000 jurisdictions and municipalities.

  • Coverage of a Person
    Create or update information about a Person.
  • Coverage of a Position
    Create or update information about a Position.
  • Coverage of a Service
    Create or update information about a public Service.
  • Coverage of an Agency
    Create or update information about a public Agency.
  • Coverage of a Governing Body
    Create or update information about a public governing body.

Repeatable milestones

Keeping the data accurate and up to date is the primary challenge.
Together, it is possible.

  • Complete a Governing Body
    Ensure records for all the members of a governing body.
  • Complete an Agency
    Ensure all the governing bodies and services are identified.
  • Complete a City
    Ensure all the public agencies within a city are listed
  • Complete a County/Borough
    Ensure all the county agencies and services are identified.

Contribute to the codebase

  • Get in touch and send a GitHub handle
  • Get added added to the repository
  • Clone the repository
  • Try to get the app up and running (pair with someone and file any issues in the Setup process)
  • Work from Trello and GitHub issues by writing features with tests


Share your ideas 💡 and feedback 💭

Please feel free to use the Feedback Form. We want to hear from you!


Contribute to the dataset by writing a "Gatherer"

Jurisdiction uses "Gatherers" to help gather an amorphous, open-ended data set. A Gatherer is used to scrape, format, and map entities from a Source URL to Jurisdictional. Given a URL, return structured entity data in specified formats.


Support Transparency ☀️ 📝 🔍
(using bitcoin)

These transactions are on-chain.
Supporters will be listed on the site, unless requested otherwise.

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Financial milestones

  • bootstrapping
    volunteer time, labor, funds
  • $100 month
    covers initial server costs
  • $1,000 month
    covers awards and incentives for contributors
  • $10,000 month
    salary for a full-time person
  • $100,000 month
    now we're doing things!