How to Help Contact Information

[sethrobles]

Knowing local representatives to contact with related information could be useful. Figuring out who to email to say you don't want flock in your city can be difficult, something that makes it easier to find out would lower the energy requirements for helping DeFlock a city.

[HaydenCash716]

I took a swing at this in #138 (lookup card on /council — city website + council search + state legislators) and #139 (actual legislator cards with photos/email/phone for the state level, via Open States).

The frustrating part is the level that matters most. For city councils — the people who actually vote on Flock contracts — there is no open data source anymore. Google Civic's representatives API was the only national one with council-level names and emails, and Google shut it down in April 2025. What's left is either commercial (Cicero, per-lookup pricing) or unreliable (Wikidata's mayor data goes stale, and showing a former mayor here would be worse than showing nothing). So #138 does the best honest thing I could find: it deep-links into the city's own website, where the roster actually lives.

One idea for going further, since it's really a maintainer call: crowdsource the council rosters, the same way the wins table works. A CMS collection — city, state, council email(s) or a link to the contact page, maybe a "verified on" date — filled in by the community as fights come up. Nobody needs all 19,000 municipalities; the few hundred cities with active Flock fights would cover most visitors, and the Discord already surfaces exactly those. The lookup card would check it first and show real names/emails when the community has them, falling back to the website links otherwise. Basically the same bet the camera map makes: the dataset nobody maintains gets built by the people who care.

Happy to build that end if the collection idea sounds right to you.