Government open data looks deceptively easy from a distance.
Find an endpoint. Make a request. Normalize the JSON. Ship an API.
That is enough for a demo. It is not enough for a production system that has to answer a consequential question next month, after the publisher changes a field, caps a response, moves an endpoint, or returns an empty page that looks exactly like “there are no records.”
We have been building CivicDataForge around one question:
What has to exist between an official government publisher and a software system—or an AI agent—before the result deserves to be called evidence?
