How to read Civus

When a source doesn’t report a value, Civus leaves it blank or says “Not recorded”. A zero means the source reported zero.

Counts of records on Civus count what Civus holds. A source that is still filling in can have more records than the count shows.

When an agency suppresses or withholds a value, for privacy or any other reason, it stays blank here. Civus doesn’t guess it or fill it in from somewhere else.

If a figure is an estimate, a sample or a projection, the label next to it says so.

Some fields are worked out by Civus, not copied from the source: a rate computed from counts, a decision outcome read from meeting minutes, a property matched from an address in a bill. These are marked as derived, and the record they come from is one click away.

A figure for the whole city is never shown as if it described one property, block or district. When a page shows a citywide number for context, it says it’s citywide.

Charts show each year as the record has it. No rolling averages, no filled-in gaps and no projected years. A year the record doesn’t cover is left out, never drawn as a drop to zero.

Civus doesn’t rank people, properties or neighborhoods, and doesn’t color outcomes as good or bad. An approval and a denial, a yes vote and a no vote, look the same. Where a number needs context, it’s shown next to a reference point, such as the total it’s part of (“12 of 17 votes”).

Every record links to where it came from: the exact moment in a hearing recording or transcript, the page of the minutes, the City’s legislative record, or the row in a City open dataset. If you can’t find the source for something, that’s a mistake worth reporting.

The same name in two records can belong to two different people. Civus puts records on one person’s page only through an identity that has been reviewed, such as a Council member’s entry in the City’s legislative record. When a match is uncertain, the records stay unlinked and the name appears as the source wrote it.

When records appear together, such as a permit and a hearing on the same property, it means they share a property, a person or a date. It doesn’t mean one caused the other.

If something on Civus looks wrong, is missing its source, or breaks one of these rules, email hello@civus.org with a link to the page and what you found. Every report is checked against the source.