Volunteer

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slug: volunteer
description: Help us verify records.

Volunteer

What is all this?

CivicPatch is a crowdsourced, open-source directory of local elected officials across the United States. All of our data is publicly available on GitHub, with plans to provide an API for those developing civic tech-based applications.

Who you are

• You have a couple of hours available a month
• You think public records should be easily accessible
• You want to contribute data that powers the next generation of civic apps

Help us verify records

Unlike federal and state elections, local government in the US is highly decentralized. To figure out who your elected official is, you have to go directly to your city's website. CivicPatch (with the help of organizations such as Civic Data Tech) aims to make data at the local level standardized.

To start with, we are building a centralized registry of elected officials. Automated scrapers collect contact information directly from municipal websites, and volunteers review that data before the results make it into the dataset.

We need your help verifying elected official records. Here are some steps to get started.

Creating your account

To get access:

1. Go to https://civicpatch.org
2. Click "Sign in" on the navbar
3. Click "Reviews" on the navbar
4. Pick a state under the state picker
5. If reviews are available, click "Review" under the "Ready for Review" card
6. (Optionally) Join WG: AI Scrapers on Unified

• You'll receive an invite link once we add you.

Training (Optional)

• https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=info%40civicdata.tech&ctz=America%2FLos_Angeles
• We have project check ins every Friday, and hackathons every other Saturday. Join in on a session, and ask about how to contribute.

Contact Us

• Email
• Join Unified on the Civic Data Tech channel

Reviewing a jurisdiction

Once signed in, click Reviews in the navbar to get started. Pick any state to filter reviews down to your selected state.

The review page shows the newly scraped officials alongside the existing directory entries, with a diff highlighting what changed. Your task is to confirm the right people were picked up, their roles look correct, and nothing looks obviously wrong.

The UI automatically flags common issues (missing officials, unexpected additions, role mismatches) so you're mostly confirming rather than auditing from scratch.

If a field is wrong, edit it directly in the UI before approving. Once everything looks good, click "Publish" to submit.

What you'll be reviewing

• Name, Email, Phone, Profile URL: copied verbatim from the municipality's website. What you see is exactly what was published.
• Role: Mayor, Council Member, Alderman, etc.
• Geographic designation: ward, district, or at-large where applicable

Field guidance

Names should match what appears on the official municipal website.

Profile URLs should be the elected official's biography page, if possible, or failing that, a directory that lists the official.

Roles should use standard terminology where possible: Mayor, Council Member, Alderman, Trustee, Commissioner, etc.

Report an issue

If the scraped data has a fixable error, edit the field directly in the review UI and then approve. Do not publish records you cannot verify.

Leave the change request open and file a bug using the "File a Bug" link present on every review page, and this will flag the issue to maintainers.

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Little social media blurb:

Help us crowdsource elected officials' data!

We are trying to scrape and crowdsource our way into building a publicly available listing of elected officials' data (names, emails, phone numbers, websites) at the local level.

Every year, we scrape municipal websites and end up with a bunch of data that need to be verified. This could be you!

Read this page for more detail.

Our team:

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Note: would also like to ask for state maintainers (who "own" the data per state), & this role is too ambiguous/ill-defined at the moment.