Institution Map

The Institution Map shows the public bodies that serve a place: the federal, state, county and city governments, their boards, commissions, committees and agencies, how they fit together, what each is charged with, and who holds its seats. Every body answers the question "What level of government is this?", and every fact links to the official document it was read from.

Open it from Statecraft → Institutions. Choose a location in the header first: the map then shows the governments of that location (for a city: the city, its county, its state and the nation). Without a location it lists every place the platform monitors.

Who can do what

The map itself is public record, the same for every workspace. What you watch is your workspace's own.

Two views

• Directory: every body in a table with its level of government, the body it is part of, and its source, closest government first (city or town, county, school and special districts, then state and federal), then by name. Search by name and filter by kind (council, board, commission, agency…). Load more fetches the next page. On a phone each body is a card.
• By level of government: a tree. Bodies are grouped by level, closest first (City or town, County, School district, Special district, State, Federal), then by place, with each body's parts nested under it (a board's committees, a department's divisions). If a place has more bodies than one view shows, the tree says it is cut short (the farthest governments' bodies are the ones left out); choose a location to narrow it. When none of a location's governments has a body on record yet, the map says so and links to each government.

A body's page

• What level of government is this? The level and the place, always shown. The level follows from the place's kind: an electoral district belongs to the government its representatives sit in, so a congressional district is federal and a state legislative district is state. Outside the United States, a national legislature is national, a province or region is shown at the state level, and a county or district at the county level.
• What it does: its mandate, quoted word for word from the source, with a link to the exact excerpt. When the source states no mandate, the page says so instead of paraphrasing.
• Related bodies: what it is part of, reports to, or appoints members to, each with its source.
• Seats and offices: each seat, who holds it or that it is vacant, and the office's published contact. These are official capacity records only: the platform keeps what the body publishes about its offices, not personal details.
• Upcoming meetings and ways to take part, linked to the Decision Monitor and the Opportunity Radar.

Sources and freshness

Beside every fact is Source (or Source excerpt when the fact was read from a passage of text) and last seen with how long ago the platform last found it at its source. Open the link to see the document, its provenance and the highlighted excerpt.

Above each list, the coverage banner says what the platform monitors for the place: verified and current, stale, partial, or not monitored. A short list where nothing is monitored means "we don't watch this yet", not "there is nothing". Source health opens the Connector health page, which shows each source behind these lists and when it was last read. (A connector is the program that reads one public source on a schedule.)

This week and history

A body's page shows the week's changes: its meetings that week and the matters that moved (introduced, on an agenda, decided, a new status), in the body's time zone. Previous week and Next week step through the weeks.

Show history lists every version of the body's mandate the platform has observed, oldest at the bottom, with what was added and removed between versions, when each was observed and replaced, and its source; and every relation (part of, reports to, appoints members to) with the dates it was first seen and ended.

Watching

Watch on a body's page adds it to your workspace's watchlist. The watchlist page lists everything your workspace watches.