Our impact
Access to government, without the barriers.
UnGovr removes the structural barriers between people and their government. UnGovr Atlas maps 330,000+ agencies across 200+ countries, and every tool we build on it gives people one consistent, accessible, multilingual way to reach them. The impact is greatest for the people who face the highest barriers to reaching government at all.
UNGOVR ATLAS COVERAGE, PLUS THE GRAND JURY ARCHIVE
Who we serve
The people government is hardest to reach.
UnGovr is built for the general public, but its impact is greatest for the people who face the highest barriers to reaching government:
- 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, such as reporting a broken streetlight or 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 interface
Accessible once, accessible everywhere.
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 330,000+ 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 interface, built and tested toward a consistent accessibility standard (our conformance target is WCAG 2.1 AA; see our accessibility statement), 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 or 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.
The structural problem
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.
Progress
How we measure it.
The first UnGovr products are live today. UnGovr Atlas is the foundation, and the tools run on it: UnGovr Request routes service requests in pilot across California and Ireland, the UnGovr Monitors network publishes six public observatories, UnGovr Law indexes 398 open records laws across 140+ countries, and the grand jury archive is searchable in one place. The full list, including what is still being built, is on the about page.
Infrastructure milestones achieved
- Entity registry covering 330,000+ entities: all 50 US states, Canada, 48 European countries, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and growing coverage across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, with 130,000+ boundaries on the map
- Open records laws cataloged across 140+ countries, including every US state and territory, with jurisdiction-specific procedures, deadlines, and requirements
- Searchable archive of 13,000+ California Grand Jury reports from all 58 counties, dating to 1905, with 93,000+ findings and 69,000+ recommendations extracted and indexed
- Web crawler infrastructure for ongoing monitoring of government websites
- Service request routing in pilot across California and Ireland, with multilingual and privacy-preserving submission paths
Outcome metrics we are building toward
As UnGovr reaches more people, 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
Sustainability
Accountable to the people it serves.
UnGovr is a nonprofit organization. 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.