For newsrooms

Data journalism partnerships.

Some stories only appear once the same question has been put to hundreds of government bodies at once. If your desk has the question, we can do the collection.

UnGovr is a nonprofit. We keep a registry of 330,000+ government entities across 200+ countries, crawl what they publish, file records requests where publishing stops, and return structured data with a source on every row. The topic does not have to be about government. It has to be answerable by government: permits, registers, contracts, inspections, budgets, licences. One agency is a phone call. Four hundred agencies in nineteen countries is the part we own.

↗

The Atlas searches places and public bodies by name, in local spelling or English. Not finding your country on the left means we have not started there yet: write to us anyway, that is how a country gets started.

What we have done elsewhere

Six of these, already running.

These are datasets we built for ourselves, each one starting from a single question put to a large number of agencies, and each still collecting. They are what the last line above looks like once it is finished. The topics were chosen for how the data behaves, never for a position on the subject.

  • watchwatch.org

    Which surveillance technology has each agency deployed? 15,219 on record.

  • computecompute.org

    Where is government compute infrastructure? 1,523 facilities.

  • agegating.org

    What does each age-verification law require? 259 jurisdictions.

  • sheriffoversight.org

    Does civilian oversight of the sheriff exist? 3,062 counties.

  • caoversight.org

    What oversight structures exist across California government? 22,667 reports.

  • civilgrandjury.org

    What have California's civil grand juries found? 9,278 reports.

Where we stand

Nonpartisan by method, not by promise.

What we do

  • Choose topics on whether the data can be collected the same way everywhere, not on where the answer lands politically.
  • Collect the whole population of bodies in scope, and publish the coverage gap beside the data.
  • Publish the method: what was asked, of whom, under which law.
  • Let the finding be that nothing is wrong, when it is.

What we do not do

  • Stories about a party, a campaign, an election contest, or an individual politician.
  • Shape a collection to reach a conclusion someone already wrote.
  • Collect in a way that breaks the law where it is collected.
  • Ask for copy approval, an advance look, or a say in what you conclude.

Embargo and licensing

You break it. Then everyone gets it.

Embargo
We will consider a partnership under news embargo. While it holds the dataset stays with your desk: not published by us, not offered to another newsroom. The lift is a date, agreed in writing before collection starts.
After the lift
Our preference is open publication under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, crediting your newsroom and UnGovr. We ask for a credit and a link and nothing else. There is no fee.
Where we say no
Exclusivity that keeps a public-interest dataset closed indefinitely, or a collection method that would not survive being described in the article. If open release will not work for your story, tell us why at the start.

Tell us the question.

One sentence about what you are trying to count and where you think it lives. A first reply is usually a plain yes, a plain no, or a note on what exists.

Email journalism@ungovr.org Other ways to partner