Welcome to
Open-Source Civics.
A nonpartisan guide to the people, groups, processes and ideas that are already doing the work — and a civic assistant that points you to exactly the right one.
Our Mission
The Work is Ours.
Civic life isn't something that happens to you. It's something you build, alongside your neighbors, one small act at a time.
Look around
Most of us care more than we let on. We just got tired. Every day the loudest voices come from somewhere far away. Meanwhile, the decisions that shape our actual lives get made quietly, a few miles from home, in rooms most of us never walk into: the road out front, the school down the street, the budget that pays for both.
Not because the doors are locked. They almost never are. The meetings are public. The records are public. The people who decide are listed somewhere, with a phone number. It’s all just scattered across a thousand websites, and it’s easy to believe it isn’t worth the trip.
Our Civic Duty exists to make that trip shorter.
What’s here
Four tools, built to work together. Start wherever you are.
- The Local Wiki: where decisions actually get made. When your county commission meets, where it meets, and who to call. It has official records for county government in all 50 states and for every city of 30,000 or more. It also lists smaller towns, school districts, and special districts. Every record links to the government’s own website and shows the day it was last checked.
- Learn Our Civics: how the machinery works. Two free civics textbooks from OpenStax, and a glossary where every term comes with a note on how to use it. There’s also a Field Guide of step-by-step plays for real situations: your first public meeting, a public records request, a budget you want to follow, a seat you might run for.
- Open Orgs: the people already doing the work. A short, vetted list of nonpartisan organizations for voting, watchdogging, research, and service. You don’t have to start from scratch. Someone has probably already organized around the thing you care about.
- The assistant: for when you’re stuck. Ask in your own words. It answers only from vetted sources, points you to the single best place to go next, and shows you where every answer came from. Ask when early voting starts, and it gives you your state’s dates and where to go.
How we keep it honest
We’re strictly nonpartisan. We don’t endorse candidates, parties, or positions, and we don’t rank anyone. The organizations we point to are nonpartisan themselves.
We’d rather show our work than ask for your trust. Every record names its sources and the day it was checked, and we recheck records on a schedule. If something’s wrong, tell us right on the page: signed-in readers can flag a record, suggest missing information, or add a community note. Every edit is part of a public history.
That’s what we mean by open-source civics. It isn’t a software license; our code isn’t public yet. It’s a promise about the civics: public sources, visible edits, nothing decided behind a closed door.
Who’s behind this
There’s no founder bio, on purpose. A tool like this shouldn’t ask you to trust a person. It should earn your trust through work you can check. So accountability runs through the records, the sources, and the revision history, not through a name.
— The Steward Clerk
Your part
You don’t need to be a special kind of person to do this. The people who show up are just the people who showed up.
So pick one thing. Look up when your city council meets. Read one page of the Field Guide. Fix one record that’s out of date. Bring a friend.
The meeting was always open. The record was always public. The work was always ours.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, ideas, or something we got wrong? Email ourcivicduty.app@gmail.com. We read every message.