organizations

Hand-curated YAML metadata for US political parties and political organizations — sibling to divisions, which curates US OCD divisions.

One file per entity, keyed by a vb-org/... id. Inspired by openstates/people and the divisions repo.

US-only. Don't add country scoping for other nations.

Scope

This repo curates entities that are:

1. Stable / slow-changing — not user-generated, not transactional.
2. Hard to source programmatically — mottos, leadership, mission statements, governance structure, official contact info, identifiers and links.
3. Worth version-controlling as hand-edited YAML.

In scope: parties (national + state affiliates), advocacy groups, PACs, super PACs, unions, trade associations, think tanks, foundations, religious lobbies, media outlets, coalitions, legislative caucuses, and party factions.

Out of scope (use other sources):

• Officials / politicians — use openstates/people.
• OCD divisions — use the divisions sibling repo.
• Bills, votes, committees — use Congress.gov / OpenStates.
• Candidates, contests, ballot measures — cycle-bound; live in voterbloc.
• FEC committee transactions — use OpenFEC directly.

Layout

data/
  party/                   parties (national)
    dem.yml, gop.yml, grn.yml, ...
    state/                 state-level affiliates (one file each)
  advocacy/                advocacy groups (501c4)
  pac/                     FEC-registered PACs
  super_pac/               independent-expenditure-only PACs
  union/                   labor unions
  trade_association/       industry trade groups
  think_tank/              policy research orgs
  foundation/              501c3 grantmaking
  religious/               religious lobbies / faith advocacy
  media/                   news outlets
  coalition/               alliances of orgs
  caucus/                  legislative caucuses & party factions

The directory is the OCD-style classification segment, verbatim and singular (e.g. union/, not unions/). The filename (minus .yml) is the id's last-segment slug.

ID scheme

vb-org/party:democratic
vb-org/party:democratic/state:ca           # state affiliate
vb-org/advocacy:american_civil_liberties_union
vb-org/union:service_employees_international_union
vb-org/think_tank:heritage_foundation
vb-org/coalition:america_votes

Slug convention

The slug is the entity's full official name, lowercased and snake_cased. No abbreviations, no nicknames. This matches OCD-style slugs in the sister divisions repo (place:los_angeles, not place:la).

• democratic, not dem
• republican, not gop (GOP is a nickname, not the legal name)
• american_civil_liberties_union, not aclu
• service_employees_international_union, not seiu

The abbreviation: field carries the short form (abbreviation: DEM, abbreviation: ACLU) for consumers that need it. Common short forms also belong in aliases:.

Schema

There is one entity class, Organization, defined in src/organizations/models.py (pydantic). A party is just an Organization whose classification is party. Other classification values cover advocacy groups, PACs, unions, think tanks, foundations, coalitions, legislative caucuses, religious lobbies, media outlets, and more — see SCHEMA.md for the full list.

For a human-readable reference with field tables, sub-object shapes, and validation rules, see SCHEMA.md. A JSON Schema export of the model is committed at schema/entity.schema.json — regenerate it after model changes with .venv/bin/organizations schema.

License

Public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal.