Last updated 26 August 2026 · Applies to districtry.com and every app under it.
The short version. districtry runs no ad network and never will. It can accept plain, disclosed sponsorship, and it applies two tests before it does.
- No sponsor can change an answer. If every sponsor withdrew tomorrow, not one district, boundary, or officeholder name on this site would differ.
- No sponsor can buy visibility based on who you are or where you live. Every visitor sees the same thing, or there is nothing to see.
- Sponsorship is never placed inside, beside, or above a result. It lives in the footer, labelled, and it is a static image or line of text served from this site — no third-party script, no network call, nothing to track you with.
Why a civic tool needs a stricter rule than a website
This app sits between a person and their government. It answers “who represents you” — often at a moment of need, when someone is about to vote, file a complaint, contest a school placement, or work out which police district covers their block. Three things follow from that, and each one rules out a form of advertising that would be unremarkable anywhere else.
Proximity reads as endorsement, in both directions. An advertisement beside an officeholder's name suggests the officeholder endorses the advertiser, and that the advertiser is somehow official. Neither party agreed to that, and the officeholder cannot opt out of a page they did not ask to appear on.
Context is targeting, even with no tracking at all. A perfectly cookieless advertisement on “what is my police district” still reaches a person at a predictable moment of stress. Nothing has to follow you around for that to be exploitative.
A district is a proxy, so targeting by district is discrimination by construction. This app turns an address into a district, and a district correlates strongly with income, race, school quality and political lean. Serving different advertisements to different districts would be geographic discrimination whether or not anyone intended it — and where the advertisement concerns housing, credit, employment or insurance, that is not merely a matter of ethics. It is the conduct fair-housing law exists to stop. This site will not build the machinery, so it cannot be asked to.
The two tests
Every offer is measured against both. Failing either one ends it.
- The independence test. Would removing all sponsorship revenue change any answer this tool gives — any boundary, any name, any source, any ordering, any decision about which county to add next? If yes, the offer is refused.
- The equal-treatment test. Can the sponsor obtain different visibility depending on who the visitor is or where they live? If yes, the offer is refused. This includes targeting by district, ZIP, city, county, IP-derived location, the address typed into the search box, and the results returned.
What is accepted
- Flat underwriting. A named sponsor, shown identically to every visitor on every page, in the footer.
- Institutional and civic funding. Grants, library and government underwriting, foundation support, and academic partnerships — on the same two tests, and disclosed the same way.
- Individual support. Recurring or one-off contributions from readers.
- Paid work on the data pipeline. Licensing, custom builds, or standing up an instance for another state or organisation. This is separate from the free public app and never affects it.
What is refused
These are refused as a standing rule, not case by case, and no price changes them.
- Advertising networks of any kind. Programmatic, exchange-based, header-bidding, or otherwise. They require third-party script, and third-party script on this site is what the privacy page exists to say does not happen.
- Anything targeted by location, district, the address entered, the results returned, or any behavioural signal.
- Candidates, campaigns, party committees, PACs, and ballot-measure committees. This app's output is, in effect, a list of the offices on your ballot. Political money adjacent to that list is a thumb on the scale even when nothing is distorted.
- Anyone with a matter pending before a body this app lists — a developer seeking a zoning change, a contractor bidding, a registered lobbyist. Courts recuse on appearance rather than proof, and the reasoning carries.
- Housing, credit, employment and insurance advertisers, for the fair-housing reason above.
- Any placement inside a result — sponsored districts, promoted officeholders, paid links in a card, or a “featured” anything. There is no version of this that is acceptable.
- Anything designed to look official, or to be mistaken for a government notice, seal, or service.
How a sponsorship appears
- In the site footer, below the data disclaimer — never in the map, the results panel, or a card.
- Labelled as sponsorship in plain words. Not “partner”, not “featured”.
- As text or a static image hosted on this site. No third-party JavaScript, no remote pixel, no iframe, no analytics beyond the site's own cookieless counter.
- Identical for every visitor, in every state, on every page.
Disclosure
Every sponsor is named on this page for as long as the sponsorship runs, and stays listed afterwards with its dates. Amounts are disclosed in ranges. There are no undisclosed sponsorships, no paid links, and no affiliate arrangements anywhere on the site.
Sponsors receive no data. There is none to give: the site keeps no accounts, no profiles, and no server-side records. What a sponsor can see about this site's audience is exactly what anyone can see, because the traffic report is public.
Sponsorship is decided by the operator alone and can be declined without explanation. A sponsor is never told which counties, layers, or rosters are being worked on next, and never has an opportunity to influence that order.
Current sponsors
None. districtry has never had a sponsor. This page exists so that the rules are written down before there is any money to argue about, rather than afterwards.
The project is currently unfunded and run at personal cost. If you want to support it directly, GitHub Sponsors is the way, and it carries none of the questions above — it buys no placement, no visibility, and no influence over what the app says.
Enquiries
Write to one of these. They all reach the same person; the separate addresses exist so that mail about money is not mixed in with mail about a wrong district line.
- Sponsorship, grants and institutional funding — sponsor@overberg.co
- Licensing the data, custom builds, a new state or organisation — data@overberg.co
- Press — press@overberg.co
- A wrong boundary, a wrong name, or a missing district — corrections@overberg.co, or the “report a bug” button in any app. Corrections are free and always will be; nothing on this page applies to them.
- Privacy and data requests — adam@overberg.co, as set out on the privacy page.
For a funding or partnership enquiry, please say who you are, what you do, and whether you have any matter pending before a government body this app covers — it is the first thing that will be checked, and saying so up front is faster than being asked.
This policy may be tightened at any time. It will not be loosened for a specific offer; if a rule here is wrong, it changes for everyone, in public, with the date recorded above.