User:TMLutas

From Sunshine Review

I'm interested in creating the civics equivalent of business intelligence applications. The people are supposed to oversee and judge the performance of the politicians in a republic but we've got less in the way of useful reports than a middle manager in a regional shoe store chain deciding whether red pumps are in this year or not. This is a case of seriously misaligned national priorities (not that pumps are unimportant mind you).

I'm starting off with creating a list of all governed jurisdictions in the US. A governed jurisdiction is a sovereign country (US), sovereign state (50 US states), our one federal district (DC), and subsidiary municipal corporations that have elected officials. It's a basic prerequisite for creating data analysis applications for anything else in the US and, so far as I can tell, there are no public copies of this available on the Internet (if you know of one, I'd love to get an URL). There are plenty of datasets that are subsets of this one and the Census bureau maintains a superset but they don't seem to care much whether a place name has a government or not.