Civic Forecast

What we do with your data, before you ask.

Licensing conversations tend to spend their first three exchanges on questions any provider is right to ask and any applicant should be able to answer in writing. Ours are answered here, so a conversation can start at the part that is actually specific to you.

The four questions

Who are you, and are you commercial?

Civic Forecast is a nonpartisan civic-intelligence and civic-education product, built to reach rural, underserved and at-risk communities. Three entities divide responsibility: Show Me Television publishes the product, API Automations builds the data and technology layer, and Leanback Digital handles partnerships and placement. Yes, there is a commercial structure, and we would rather state it than have it discovered: the app is free, a low-cost optional upgrade exists, and no part of the business sells user-level data.

Technically, what happens to our data inside your system?

It is fetched through your sanctioned method with your credentials, honouring your rate limits; normalized into internal schemas with your provenance preserved as a first-class field rather than a note; joined to stable geographic identifiers so it aggregates without exposing records; and reduced to derived indicators (rates, deltas, per-capita values, bands). What a reader sees is a figure and your name. There is no record table, no export and no query interface over your data.

What will you publish, and what will you never do?

We publish transformed, aggregate outputs: cards, metrics, maps and explainers, each attributed to you on the surface that uses it. We do not republish your content as journalism, resell or redistribute your records, place your data behind a paywall, reconstruct your dataset, build a substitute for your product, or train models on your data outside the licence. Those are not aspirations; they are the bounds the platform is built to.

What licence do you need, and what do you commit to in return?

Usually the narrowest class that permits derived, attributed, aggregate publication in a commercial product. In return: attribution that persists wherever your data contributes, a licence class recorded against your source in a register that drives what the product displays, no redistribution, and a named contact who can answer for how your data is used.

What you would be joining

The verified badge is not an opinion

Sources carry a verified badge in the app and on this site when their licence class is public domain or open licence, and only then. It is read from the same register that drives everything else, so it cannot be granted by enthusiasm or withdrawn by oversight. A licensed or partner source is not lesser; it is differently bounded, and the badge says which.

Stated as exclusions, not aspirations

Each of these is a thing we will not do with a partner's data, written this way because a commitment phrased as an intention is not one.

What a partner gets that is not a logo

Your data reaches an audience that does not read data portals, in a form they can act on, with your name attached at the point of use rather than in a credits page. Most datasets are inert alone and say something the moment they meet another, which is the whole premise of a Finding, and the reason a partner's data is often worth more here in combination than it is on its own.

Licence classifications reflect a good-faith reading of a provider's published terms. They are not legal advice, and a provider's licensing team makes the final determination.