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We're tapping into an equally complex network of people across the country who want police data and empowering them with strong, flexible infrastructure.
Our goal is to make the process as simple as possible, and break up the massive project into human-sized chunks of work. We can match the complexity of a decentralized police system with a decentralized community.
Think Wikipedia meets Open States meets Internet Archive.
The PDAP non-profit builds a collection of open-source apps and services to help the community write scrapers.
PDAP is the steward for the mission and archives. It ensures the data is verifiable and freely accessible.
PDAP sets a high standard for Scraper quality, and runs trainings to help the community meet it.
The Scraper community writes and maintains a vast library of Scrapers to cover every U.S. police agency.
The community is built on a mutual aid model, where people whose work is built on police data have the agency to collect and share it using PDAP-built tools.
The PDAP non-profit has a traditional structure.
The PDAP board is Eddie Brown, Alec Akin, and Josh Lintag. Our staff are Josh Chamberlain and Richard Ji.
Right now, everyone is a volunteer. To get involved, come to an open working session.
The Scraper community is decentralized, with flat hierarchy and community governance.
Micro-communities of volunteers spring up around geographic regions or types of data.
The PDAP non-profit is funded by grants and individual contributions.
The Scraper community is funded as a key program of the non-profit.
It uses the distributed computing power of its members to balance the workload.
Check out our pitch deck here, and our roadmap here.
We're compiling police data that's already public into a unified, accessible resource.
We aren't a watchdog—our activism is data collection, not analysis or research.
Kristin Tynski kicked off this project by scraping records from her own community. Our community gained momentum on Reddit.
Yes. We're consolidating public information, in accordance with established legal precedents.
No. Our only motivation is to provide trusted data in an age of disinformation.
Every step in our process is accessible and transparent. We believe web3 principles are key to our success and longevity.
We're a 501c3 non-profit. We are accepting donations.
