Free to copy: the data and the code
Everything County Commons publishes is free to copy, reuse and build on — by a resident, a reporter, a school, a nonprofit, another county or a government.
The data and the writing: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
The money trails, tables, sources lists, county pages, petitions text and every other page this site publishes are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
That means you can:
- Share it — copy and pass it on in any form.
- Change it — remix it, correct it, build on it.
- Use it for anything — including a newspaper, a class, a campaign of your own or a business.
The one condition is credit. Say where it came from and link back, for example: Source: County Commons (countycommons.us), CC BY 4.0. If you changed it, say so.
The code: MIT
The software that runs the site is under the MIT license. You can run it, change it and run your own copy. Keep the license notice with the code.
What this license does not cover
- The original government records. Budgets, audits, ordinances and minutes belong to the governments that made them. Facts and numbers can't be owned by anyone, and most U.S. public records are free to use, but each record keeps whatever status it already had. Every number on this site links to the record it came from.
- Data from other sources. Federal data (Census, BLS, HUD, IMLS, HRSA and others) is public domain or has its own terms, named on the page where it's used.
- Residents' personal information. Signers' names, contact details, votes and private notes are never published, never shared and never part of any download or copy. They are kept in a separate database for that reason.
Where to get it
Why it's open
From the project's charter: if a better steward — a community, a co-op, even a government — someday takes this work over and makes it standard, that is the goal, not a loss. An open license makes sure no one, including the founder, can lock it up.