Where this works today.
Where it goes next.
Civic Filament reads from public-records APIs that every level of government is supposed to expose. Coverage is broad at the federal level and grows city-by-city, state-by-state, as adapters are built and verified.
FEDERAL
STATES
Massachusetts, Illinois, Oregon, California, New York, Washington, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Minnesota, Texas, District of Columbia
Pre-registered with full-tier scrapers. Other states unlock automatically once OpenStates and Census API keys are added — both are free.
Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Wyoming
All 50 states are technically supported by the underlying scrapers. The pre-registered set is curated to keep the admin dropdown manageable; expanding is a one-line change once a community asks for it.
CITIES
WHY SOME PLACES TAKE LONGER
The federal data layer is excellent because three independent groups (the National Archives for the Federal Register, GovTrack volunteers, and the USASpending team) have maintained stable, well-documented APIs for over a decade. Plug in, get clean data.
City-level data is much messier, by no fault of citizens. Cities run open-data programs on at least four different platforms (Socrata, CKAN, ArcGIS, custom CMSes), each with its own API, query language, and conventions. A scraper that works for Chicago doesn't work for Atlanta because Atlanta runs ArcGIS, which speaks a different protocol entirely.
Dataset IDs also rotate. A city can publish a "Vendor Payments" dataset in 2024 with one ID, then republish a refactored version in 2026 with a new ID — and the old URL silently 404s. Maintaining live coverage means periodically re-walking each portal to find the current canonical dataset for budgets, contracts, voting records, etc.
Some cities just publish badly.A handful release budget data only as quarterly PDFs, or behind a "fill out this form to download" wall, or as proprietary ESRI shapefiles that take a day to convert. Those cities aren't hostile to transparency — they're under-resourced. When their open-data team gets funding (or volunteer help), structured APIs follow, and we can plug in.
The work to add each new city is bounded but real — usually 30–60 minutes for a city on a known platform, plus ~1 day to build a fresh adapter family the first time we encounter a new platform. We grow the list deliberately rather than ship broken integrations that quietly stop returning data.
NOMINATE YOUR COMMUNITY
If your city or state isn't covered yet and you want it prioritized, tell us. We pick the next adapter targets partly by request volume.
SUGGEST A JURISDICTION