About UnGovr
We map government, then build the tools that run on it.
UnGovr is a nonprofit organization building the public-interest identity, geography, and routing layer for government. Three questions run through all of it: who governs this place, what authority and public record apply, and how a person or system can act. We do this work because transparency is the foundation of trust between the public and its government, and none of that starts until those three have answers.
Who we are
An independent nonprofit, building in the open.
UnGovr makes government information accessible, searchable, and machine-readable. Everything we publish or operate sits under one of three questions. They are the same three a person works through when government touches their life, and the same three a piece of software has to resolve before it can act.
01 Who governs this place?
This is the identity and geography half of the answer, and it is UnGovr Atlas: 330,000+ government entities across 200+ countries, with 130,000+ boundaries drawn on the ground. Anywhere you stand, a stack of bodies governs you rather than one, and a postal address names the mail route rather than the stack. Resolving a location into the city, county, districts, and agencies that actually hold authority over it is the work the map exists to do.
02 What authority and public record apply?
Naming the body is half of it. The other half is the law it operates under and the record it leaves: transparency statutes, oversight bodies, meeting documents, grand jury findings. We publish that record and link it back to where it came from, rather than standing in for the official source.
03 How can a person or system act?
With the body identified and its obligations known, a report, a records request, or an API call can be pointed at the office that actually owns it. That is the routing layer, and it is the difference between a reference work and something you can act through. Residents, journalists, researchers, and civic organizations all use the same open platform to do it.
The Atlas is the foundation, not the whole of it: question one is where the other two become answerable. And none of this replaces official government systems. We put a consistent, accessible layer in front of them, built and published as open civic infrastructure, so that finding the right agency, understanding what it does, and reaching it no longer requires insider knowledge.
What we build
The Atlas, and what runs on it.
This is the full list, grouped by which of the three questions each product answers. They are not separate tools that happen to share a logo: each one either establishes an answer or spends one.
01 Who governs this place?
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UnGovr Atlas
The map itself. Each layer of government tied to the territory it serves, from national ministries to mosquito abatement districts.
02 What authority and public record apply?
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UnGovr Law
The transparency-law library: 398 open records laws across 140+ countries, plus open meetings, fiscal, and oversight statutes.
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UnGovr Monitors
Six public monitors that document government power and its controls. We publish the record; others act on it. Sheriffs, civil grand juries, surveillance technology, data centers and age-verification law.
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Grand Jury Reports
13,000+ California civil grand jury reports, findings, and agency responses, searchable in one place.
03 How can a person or system act?
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UnGovr Request
Report an issue once, and Atlas routing delivers it to the agency that actually owns it. In pilot across California and Ireland.
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Data, API and the agent layer
The same map as data, so the software people rely on can reach government correctly rather than guessing at it.
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In the worksSOON
UnGovr Words is turning public-meeting recordings into readable, searchable records, and Ask Clark previews a civic assistant that answers questions with the public record itself.
Who we serve
The public first. Government, in service of that.
We serve the general public first. The people who depend on government, whether to get a service, find a record, or understand a decision that affects them, are our priority in everything we build.
In service of that priority, we deliberately design our projects to help government as well. When agencies can publish information, answer requests, and run their operations more easily, residents get faster, clearer, more accountable service in return. Helping government work better is one of the most direct ways we help the public, not a competing goal.
How we work
Prove it once, then expand.
Build outward from proof
We get an approach working in a specific place or use case, then repeat it elsewhere, rather than trying to cover every jurisdiction at once.
Work in the open
Our vision, architecture, and progress are publicly documented. Learn more about the technology behind UnGovr. We welcome collaboration with other organizations working on civic technology.
Stay independent
As a nonprofit, we have no shareholders demanding growth at any cost. That independence lets us focus on what actually helps people engage with their government, and keeps the record we publish neutral.
Open source and standards
A public-interest voice in open standards.
UnGovr builds on open standards and brings a public-interest voice to the communities that develop them.
Agentic AI Foundation
UnGovr is an Associate Member of the Agentic AI Foundation, a Linux Foundation initiative advancing open standards and open source infrastructure for interoperable AI agents, including the Model Context Protocol (MCP). UnGovr contributes a nonprofit perspective focused on how AI agents interact with governments, public records, and civic services, and publishes its own MCP server for government entity data.
The Linux Foundation
UnGovr is an Associate Member of The Linux Foundation, supporting neutral, collaborative development of the open technologies and standards that civic infrastructure depends on.
Infrastructure support
Protected by Project Galileo.
UnGovr is protected by Cloudflare through Project Galileo, which provides free, enterprise-grade security to public-interest sites that are frequent targets of cyber attacks. Galileo's DDoS mitigation, DNS, SSL, and CDN services are foundational to how UnGovr delivers government transparency data across 200+ countries. Learn more about the technology behind UnGovr.
Where to go next
The vision, and the people it reaches.
This page is the overview. Our vision covers where UnGovr is headed and the principles guiding the work; our impact covers the people who benefit most from barrier-free access to government and how we reach them.
Contact
Reach us directly.
Email: hello@ungovr.org
Address:
UnGovr
19 E Canon Perdido St, Suite B
Santa Barbara, CA 93101