Legal — Open Data

GoVT Open Civic Data License

Terms version: 0.1-draft

Draft term sheet — pending final legal-language review. The terms below are the ratified, substantive terms every consumer of /api/v1 is expected to follow today. They will be finalized into formal legal language by counsel; the meaning of each term is not expected to change materially. Every API response reports the exact termsVersion it was served under.

Scope

This license governs any use of data served by Go Vermont’s public, unauthenticated /api/v1 open-data endpoints (officials, events, towns, counties, and the verify endpoint). Data is licensed to any consumer, without registration or a bespoke integration — the terms below are the only gate.

1. Attribution

Any public display of GoVT data must include the exact text Data: GoVT (govermont.co), in plain text, in the same visual unit as the data. Do not use the GoVT name, logo, or any “powered by GoVT” framing beyond this attribution string — GoVT does not co-brand with consumer products.

2. Envelope preservation

Every record you display must render its provenance.label verbatim, in the same visual unit as the fact itself — do not paraphrase, truncate, or recompose it from the envelope’s individual fields. If you re-serve GoVT data programmatically (API, export, feed), the full provenance block must travel with the record, byte-intact.

3. No raising the trust tier

You may present GoVT data at a lower trust posture than its envelope states (e.g. treating a verified fact as merely “reported” in your own product). You may never present it at a higher posture than provenance.trust_tier and provenance.label state.

4. No endorsement

You may not state or imply that GoVT endorses, partners with, verifies, or is affiliated with your product. “GoVT-verified” may describe only an individual fact that carries a T0 envelope with its label — never your product as a whole.

5. No fabrication or misattribution

You may not attribute to GoVT any record, value, or claim that GoVT does not actually serve via its public API. Do not construct a plausible-looking record (an address, a name, a contact) and present it as GoVT data.

6. No stale-as-fresh

A record whose envelope reports freshness: "aging", "outdated", or "unknown" must not be displayed without that freshness state visible to your end user (the pre-composed label already carries this — see §2).

7. Audit and termination

GoVT may audit any public surface that displays GoVT-attributed data. A material breach of these terms terminates this license and your right to attribute data to GoVT, effective immediately. GoVT’s own served data and git history serve as the audit record — see the open data contract for the verify endpoint that lets anyone check a claim against what GoVT is currently serving.

Questions

Contact hello@govermont.co with licensing questions, or report an issue.