UnGovr: Government Unlocked

The vision

Government works in two directions: information and services flow out to the public, and requests and participation flow in from residents. Today, both directions are broken by complexity – thousands of agencies, each with different systems, procedures, and requirements.

UnGovr is a bridge layer that simplifies both directions. Outward: open records, meeting documents, service updates, and public notices become findable and understandable in one place. Inward: service requests, open records requests, and public comments reach the right agency in the right format, without residents needing to know the internal structure.

Critically, UnGovr does not require any software to be installed within government. We work with what already exists – public websites, existing email addresses, standard open-records procedures, published meeting calendars – and build the bridge from the outside. This means any jurisdiction, anywhere in the world, can benefit without procurement, IT approval, or integration projects.

What success looks like

For residents

Finding the right agency for your issue no longer requires insider knowledge. Filing an open records request no longer requires a law degree – UnGovr handles the complexity of different laws, deadlines, and procedures across jurisdictions. Following an issue across meetings and documents no longer takes detective work.

For government

Requests arrive properly formatted and directed to the right department. Staff spend less time on routing and process, and more time on substance. Open records and public notices reach a wider audience without additional publishing effort. The tools that make this possible are developed once and work everywhere – a small town benefits from the same infrastructure as a large city.

For agents

Any software that interacts with government – from civic apps and dashboards to agentic AI systems acting on behalf of residents – can query entities, boundaries, services, laws, and records programmatically. The same data that powers our consumer experience is available through structured APIs with consistent shape across jurisdictions, so tools can navigate government as fluently as a well-informed person.

For trust

When interactions between people and government work well in both directions, trust grows. Residents who can see what their government is doing and get timely responses to requests are more likely to engage. Government that can serve the public efficiently earns the credibility to govern effectively. Over time, this creates a cycle where better access leads to more participation, which leads to better governance.

Why now

Several developments make this possible today in ways that weren't feasible before:

• Modern mapping – Geographic data and tools have become sophisticated enough to accurately map the complex overlapping jurisdictions of local government.
• Mobile-first access – Most people now have capable devices in their pockets, enabling location-aware experiences and notifications.
• AI capabilities – Language models can process, summarize, and connect information across large document collections – and across languages – in ways that would require enormous manual effort otherwise.
• Centralized tooling, universal reach – This is the first time in history that a single set of civic tools, developed centrally, can potentially serve government tasks anywhere in the world. The same platform that helps a California city respond to records requests can help a commune in France, a municipality in Ireland, or a prefecture in Japan, because the work happens outside government systems, not inside them.

Because UnGovr requires no software installed within government, adoption is not gated by procurement cycles or IT budgets. The bridge works from the outside, using public interfaces that already exist. This means the tooling can scale to new jurisdictions and countries without waiting for each government to opt in.

Next steps

Learn more about what we're building and how to get involved: