About docketcity.com

Local government is where most decisions that touch your daily life actually get made — what gets built, what gets taxed, what gets policed, what gets funded. Those decisions are all public. They are just impossible to find.

Every council and commission publishes agendas, ordinances, minutes and video. Each one does it on its own portal, in its own format, with no search worth using and no way to be notified when something affects you. So the record is technically open and practically invisible.

docketcity.com collects those records directly from the governments' own published data and puts them in one searchable place. Currently 342 jurisdictions, 133,437 meetings and 806,103 pieces of legislation.

Where the data comes from

Directly from each government's official legislative management system, via its public API. Nothing here is scraped from behind a login. Every page links back to the official source record.

Two different kinds of thing on this site

It matters which one you are looking at, so it is worth being plain about it.

• Reproduced records. Meetings, agendas, ordinances and resolutions. Titles, statuses and dates are reproduced as published, not rewritten. If one of these looks wrong, it is almost certainly faithful to what the source system published — and the link on the page goes to that original.
• Derived claims. Everything on the contract, company and rebid pages: the dollar amount, the company name, the category, the end date. These are read out of the record's title by pattern matching. They are ours, not the government's. They are right often enough to be useful and not often enough to be relied on without checking.

How the derived claims go wrong

Not hypothetically — these are mistakes that have actually occurred and been fixed: a line-item price read as the contract value; a figure quoted in a programme's description read as a purchase; a description of services read as the name of a company; a company's state of registration read as the company itself; a date the government typed wrongly and we copied faithfully, like a contract ending on 29 February in a year that has no 29 February; a government filed under the wrong state because two places share a name; an end date computed from a stated term when the government never published one. Any date shown as estimated is in that last category.

Two consequences follow. If you are about to act on something here — bid on it, report on it, cite it — open the source link first. And if a figure looks implausible, it may simply be wrong.

Corrections

If a record about you, your company or your government is wrong, say so and it will be fixed. That applies to an extraction error, an out-of-date status, or a jurisdiction attributed to the wrong place. Corrections are made to the extraction rules rather than by hand where possible, so the same mistake stops happening everywhere at once.

What will not be removed is an accurate reproduction of a public record. This site does not decide what a government published; it only makes it findable.

Robots and reuse

Crawl it. Reuse it. There is a JSON API and an Atom feed on every jurisdiction, topic and rebid view, so nobody needs to scrape the HTML. The only thing asked in return: when you republish, keep the link back to the government's own record, so your reader can check it too.