Locations and jurisdictions

A location is a place your workspace follows: a city, a county, a state or province, or a country. It is saved together with its jurisdiction stack. A jurisdiction is a government or a district with authority over the place. The stack lists every one that applies, from the place's own city council up to the nation. Work in other parts of the app can be filtered by a location, and the location menu in the header sets the location you are looking at.

You always choose the location yourself. The platform never guesses it from your IP address, your browser's language or time zone, or any other request detail. Switching the location in the header changes what you see, never your data.

Choosing a location

Open the location menu in the header, or go to Locations.

• Find a place: type a city, county, census-designated place (CDP) or state, for example Springfield, MO, Kitsap County or Silverdale, Kitsap County, WA. A state or county in the text narrows the match. Outside the United States, type a town, region or country, for example Edinburgh, Kent, Victoria, BC or Perth, Scotland; a country, region or region code after a comma narrows the match. Names in other languages and scripts work too (Dùn Èideann, Лондон), and so do ISO 3166-2 codes such as GB-SCT.
• Use an address works only for US addresses.
• Use an address: type a street address. It is sent to the US Census Geocoder to find the point, and the stack is resolved for the districts at that exact point.

Then pick a result and confirm it. When several places match (there are Springfields in at least five states, and Victorias in Canada and Australia), nothing is preselected: you must pick one. Each result shows its county or council, region and country. A ZIP code is not a place; use an address instead.

Strong matches are listed first; weaker ones follow under Other places with similar names. Each result can be confirmed for about ten minutes. After that, search again. A location can only be saved from a result you picked, so a saved location always refers to a real, loaded place.

Saving a place the workspace has already saved (the same place, found the same way, with the same governments) chooses the saved location instead of adding a copy, and does not count against the plan's limit; the picker says so. A place you already saved shows Use it instead of Confirm.

The search answers in one of these ways:

What happens to an address

The address goes to the Census Geocoder and nowhere else. It is not saved with the location, not written to the audit log and not logged. The saved location records only that it came from an address, plus the place and the districts at that point. Use a public address (a city hall, a library) if you want to share the location with colleagues without revealing a home address.

Reading a stack

Open a saved location to see its stack, grouped by how each jurisdiction relates to the place:

Each row shows:

• How the relationship was worked out: its own government, the same boundary, boundary containment or overlap, Census codes, the address point, or a county listing.
• Source and vintage: which Census release the boundary came from (for example TIGER/Line 2025), and the dates that boundary was valid.
• Licence: the licence of the boundary (public domain for US Census data; CC BY 4.0, Open Government Licence or ODbL for many others), linked to its terms.
• Confidence:
  • Official comes from official boundaries or codes.
  • Listed is used for special districts (ports, transit, fire, water and the like). The Census of Governments lists them by county but publishes no boundary, so a listed district serves the county and may not cover this exact place. Check before relying on it. Abroad, a province whose outline is not loaded is listed from its gazetteer code.
  • Approximate is used when a place's point lies just outside every simplified outline (usually on a coast): it is placed in the nearest one within 2.5 km.

Edges that merely touch, or overlaps too thin to be real (a strip a few metres wide along a shared border), are left out.

Below the stack, Loaded data for this area says which layers are loaded for the place's state (abroad, its country). If school districts are not loaded for a state, or provinces for a country, the stack says so rather than looking complete.

Data sources and licences lists the credit line of every source the place and its stack come from. Keep these credits when you copy the data elsewhere: most of the licences require them.

Select any jurisdiction to see its parents, every boundary period on record and, for a special district, its Census of Governments listing.

As of a date

Boundaries change: legislative districts are redrawn after each census, and cities annex land. A saved location keeps the stack as of the day you saved it, with the source and vintage each entry had then. Later data loads do not change it.

To see how a stack has changed, open the location and use Compare with the stack on to pick another date. For example, Rocky Point, Washington, was in Legislative District 35 before the 2022 redistricting and is in Legislative District 23 after it.

Time zones

Each place and jurisdiction has its own time zone. Meeting times and deadlines for a jurisdiction are shown in that jurisdiction's zone, with the zone named (for example "Oct 20, 2026, 7:00 PM PDT"), not in the zone of the computer you are using.

Who can do what

• Every member can search, view saved locations and their stacks, and look up jurisdictions.
• Owners, researchers, editors and project leads can save, rename, re-theme and delete locations.

Deleting a location hides it from the menu. Work that already points at it keeps its location and stack.

Plan limits

At the limit, delete a location to add another. Deleted locations do not count.

Coverage

In the United States, places and boundaries come from the US Census Bureau: TIGER/Line boundaries for states, counties, incorporated places, census-designated places, county subdivisions (New England towns and other governmental townships), school districts, state legislative districts and congressional districts, plus special districts from the Census of Governments.

Elsewhere, countries and their first- and second-level divisions (for example the UK's nations and council areas, or Australia's states) come from geoBoundaries, and towns and cities from GeoNames. Every country has its national government in the stack, and its national legislature where it has been reviewed. Only divisions that are governments appear as jurisdictions: England, Ireland's provinces and Canada's economic regions are places you can pick, not governments.

Your administrator decides which states and countries are loaded. Source monitoring (meetings, agendas, documents) outside the United States is separate: the coverage page reports it as unsupported, with the official websites to check instead, until a coverage pack (the set of monitored sources for a place) exists for that country.