# Civil Services: Open civic data and elected official APIs Source: [https://peterschmalfeldt.com/projects/civil-services-open-civic-data-and-elected-official-apis]() Completed: 2020-01-01 Project tags: Civic Technology, Open Data, API Development, Open Source An open civic data platform connecting activists and developers with verified information about elected officials through a public API and location-based representative lookup. ## Project Links - [Video]() ![Civil Services Logo]() ## Making reliable information about elected officials accessible to the people who needed it. Civic organizations and volunteers struggled to find dependable, current information about elected officials. Contact details, social accounts, district boundaries, and reusable photographs were scattered across sources and difficult to verify. Activists also needed a practical way to identify the right local, state, and federal representatives for a given location, without assembling and maintaining their own datasets. ![State Selection]() ![API Endpoints]() ![GeoJSON Map Support]() ![Open Source]() ## Building an open civic data platform with a public API, geolocation services, and volunteer-driven data verification. I founded Civil Services as an open platform backed by a documented public API for elected-official data and jurisdictional boundaries. We developed geolocation-based mapping to match a location with its elected representatives. More than 400 volunteers helped collect, normalize, and verify records across the United States, supporting an accessible resource that civic technology teams and activist organizations could integrate into their work. ![Website Hero]() ## Supporting civic engagement at scale and responsibly retiring the platform as public data access improved. Civil Services provided civic engagement organizations with a shared source of representative data and location-based lookup capabilities. Its volunteer community grew to more than 400 contributors, and the work led to recognition from Google's Jigsaw team and my selection as a User in Residence. As government data and public APIs improved, the platform's original gap narrowed. We notified API users 90 days in advance and shut down the service in 2020.