Foundational Access to Government
UnGovr removes the structural barriers between people and their government – providing one consistent, accessible, multilingual interface to 320,000+ agencies across 200+ countries.
Who we serve
UnGovr is designed for everyone, but our impact is greatest for people who face the highest barriers to government access:
- People who need accessible interfaces. A person with a visual impairment needs to report a crosswalk signal that stopped producing audible cues, or furniture dumped on the sidewalk blocking their path. They face a different website for every agency – each with its own layout, navigation quirks, and accessibility gaps. A single county might have dozens of agency sites, most built at different times to different standards.
- People who need government in their preferred language. Non-English speakers navigating city services, school enrollment, or records requests face a patchwork of translated and untranslated government sites. Many agencies have no translation at all.
- People who need privacy in government interactions. Immigrants, domestic violence survivors, and others who are justifiably cautious about direct government contact need a way to exercise their civic rights – reporting a broken streetlight, requesting public records – without unnecessary personal exposure.
- Working families without time to navigate bureaucracy. Understanding which of your overlapping jurisdictions handles a given issue, finding the right form on the right website, meeting the right deadline – this process favors people with time, education, and insider knowledge.
- Rural communities far from government offices. When the nearest government office is an hour away and their website was last updated in 2012, digital access is the only practical option.
These are people who need government most but face the highest barriers to reaching it.
One accessible interface for every jurisdiction
WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) is the international standard for making web content usable by people with disabilities. It covers screen reader compatibility, keyboard navigation, color contrast, text alternatives for images, predictable page structure, and more.
Today, if a person with a visual impairment needs to report a broken crosswalk signal, check a meeting agenda, or submit an open records request, they encounter a different website for each agency – each with different layouts, different navigation, and different levels of accessibility compliance. Multiply that across 320,000+ government entities and the accessibility landscape is essentially random. Most government agencies will never independently achieve and maintain full WCAG compliance.
UnGovr's approach is different. Instead of requiring hundreds of thousands of agencies to each build and maintain accessible interfaces, we provide a single, fully WCAG 2.1 compliant interface that works identically across every jurisdiction. File a service request in rural Texas or downtown Chicago – same interface, same accessibility, same screen reader experience. One interface to build, one to audit, one to get right.
The same principle applies to multilingual access. Rather than waiting for each agency to translate their site into Spanish, Vietnamese, Tagalog, or any of dozens of other languages, UnGovr proxies the interaction in the user's language regardless of which agency they're engaging with.
And it applies to privacy. UnGovr can submit a service request on behalf of a user – reporting that broken streetlight, requesting that public record – without requiring the user to create an account on the government's system or share identifying information beyond what the task requires.
This is the barrier that no individual agency can solve alone: consistency across jurisdictions.
What barriers we remove
The United States alone has over 90,000 local governments. Add counties, special districts, school boards, tribal nations, state agencies, and federal bodies and the number exceeds 150,000. Each operates independently, with its own website, its own forms, its own procedures.
This isn't a problem of missing information. Government records, meeting agendas, and service request systems exist. The problem is structural: there is no common interface. A resident needs to know which of their overlapping jurisdictions handles a given issue, find the right website, locate the right form, understand the right procedure, and meet the right deadline. This process systematically favors people with time, education, and insider knowledge.
UnGovr is civic infrastructure that makes both directions of government work for everyone:
- Outward: Public records, meeting documents, service updates, and notices become findable and understandable in one place – in any language, through an accessible interface.
- Inward: Service requests, open records requests, and public comments reach the right agency in the right format – without residents needing to understand the internal structure of their government.
This is foundational civic access. Not a new app for a single city, but infrastructure that works across every jurisdiction a person might need.
How we measure progress
UnGovr is in its infrastructure-building phase, with a public beta planned for 2026. We are currently building the foundation that makes measurable outcomes possible at scale.
Infrastructure milestones achieved
- Entity registry covering all 50 US states, Canada, 48 European countries, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and growing coverage across Africa, Asia, and the Americas
- Open records laws cataloged across all US states and territories with jurisdiction-specific procedures, deadlines, and requirements
- Searchable archive of California Grand Jury reports from all 58 counties, dating to 1905 – with 120,000+ findings and 100,000+ recommendations extracted and indexed
- Web crawler infrastructure for ongoing monitoring of government websites
- Multilingual SMS-based service request interface (operational in test jurisdictions)
Outcome metrics we are building toward
As UnGovr reaches public availability, we will measure:
- Time-to-service: How quickly a resident goes from identifying a problem to reaching the right agency
- Successful routing rate: Percentage of service requests that reach the correct jurisdiction on the first attempt
- Reduced administrative burden: Decrease in improperly formatted requests that government staff must redirect
- Completion rates: How often people successfully complete critical government interactions (records requests, service reports, public comment submissions) compared to going direct
- Accessibility reach: Percentage of interactions completed through screen readers, multilingual interfaces, or privacy-preserving channels
Our team
UnGovr is led by people with deep experience in scalable infrastructure, cybersecurity, and civic engagement. Our team includes a co-founder with 30+ years building platforms at scale (VP Engineering at Akamai), a chief security officer with two decades in cybersecurity (Meta, Capital One, NYSE), and engineers who serve on government oversight bodies – including a current member of the Santa Barbara County Civil Grand Jury.
Financial sustainability
UnGovr is a US based 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We have no shareholders, no advertising, and no data monetization. We believe civic infrastructure should be accountable to the people it serves, not to investors.
Our model is built for efficiency:
- Build once, deploy everywhere. Patterns developed for one jurisdiction work across all jurisdictions. The entity registry, service routing, and multilingual interface are designed to scale without proportional cost increases.
- No government procurement required. UnGovr works with publicly available information and standard communication channels. We don't need agencies to install software, sign contracts, or allocate IT resources.
- Open civic infrastructure. We are building a public good – foundational access to government that any person, organization, or developer can build on.
Get involved
UnGovr is building the civic infrastructure that makes government work for everyone. If your organization shares this mission, we'd welcome a conversation.