I've built Jurisdictional, as I find time, between work, an unreasonable reading appetite, and my loving family. Accordingly, contributions to the project come in intermittent waves. I try to respond to feedback within a day, but sometimes it takes a week.
Jurisdictional exists to demonstrate the possibilities and benefits of a unified interface between citizens and government.
Jurisdictional is a web application, written in Ruby, on the Rails web framework. Jurisdictional uses Rollbar for exception notifications and Sendgrid for email.
Data is stored in a PostgreSQL database, and data can be shared via a .json API.
Contributions are funded and rewarded using bitcoin (BSV), which supports micropayments and extremely low fees.
Jurisdictional infrastructure is built on products and services provided by the following organizations.
Open data published as shapefiles by Census.gov forms the base layer of Jurisdictional; providing shapefiles for Jurisdictional boundaries; states, counties, cities, and also: county divisions, elementary school districts, secondary school districts, unified school districts, state legislature districts (upper and lower), and congressional districts. The jurisdictional layers form a lattice to hang other data off of.
For each jurisdictional layer, Jurisdictional users add data for agencies, their governing bodies, the positions composing those bodies (and elected positions), the people on those bodies and in those positions, plus the public Services agencies provide.
Jurisdictional allows users to create accounts. When you create an account, your information is stored in a database table of users.
Jurisdictional will not sell your data.
Jurisdictional IS exploring ways to incentivize, and thus reward users (like you) for contributions. Honestly, I'm not even sure how that might look or what data and financial laws that may invoke — so, in the future, we might offer ways for you to share your data with others, under certain conditions and terms.
