> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://atlas.rebuildingus.org/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Platform overview

> Atlas is a source-linked civic discovery platform for finding the people, organizations, and initiatives rebuilding public life.

Atlas is an open-source civic discovery platform. It helps anyone find people,
organizations, initiatives, campaigns, and events working on public problems
across America, then trace each record back to the sources that support it.

The product is not just a database. The experience matters: a user should be
able to search a place, open a profile, understand why the result is credible,
see how it connects to other actors, and decide what to do next.

## The problem

People are doing serious civic work everywhere: tenants organizing in Detroit,
worker centers supporting immigrant labor in Phoenix, transit advocates fighting
for better service in Nevada, mutual-aid networks keeping neighbors housed,
local journalists exposing corruption, and public-interest teams building tools
that make government easier to understand.

The hard part is finding them. The public record is scattered across local news,
organization websites, nonprofit directories, podcast interviews, campaign
pages, government records, and research reports. A person may be visible in one
city but invisible to someone outside that network.

Atlas exists so useful civic work does not stay hidden just because it is local,
poorly indexed, or spread across many sources.

## What Atlas helps users do

<CardGroup cols={3}>
  <Card title="Find civic actors" icon="magnifying-glass" href="/docs/quickstart-browse">
    Search by place, issue, actor type, source type, or keyword. Start with a
    public question like "Who is working on housing in Detroit?"
  </Card>

  <Card title="Trust the record" icon="shield-check" href="/docs/resources/trust">
    Inspect source titles, dates, URLs, excerpts, corroboration, freshness, and
    correction pathways before treating a profile as useful.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Turn discovery into work" icon="file-text" href="/docs/workspace/customer-workflow">
    Save actors, create source-linked briefs, track coverage, watch for changes,
    export proof, or connect an API and agent workflow.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## What Atlas knows

An Atlas record can include:

| Field         | What it means                                                                                                                     |
| ------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Name and type | Whether the record is a person, organization, initiative, campaign, or event.                                                     |
| Place         | The city, state, region, or broader geography tied to the work.                                                                   |
| Issue areas   | The civic topics the record connects to, such as housing affordability, public transit, labor, climate, democracy, or healthcare. |
| Description   | A short summary derived from public evidence.                                                                                     |
| Sources       | The public documents, articles, pages, records, or listings where Atlas found the information.                                    |
| Freshness     | When sources were published, when Atlas first saw the record, and when it last saw supporting evidence.                           |
| Connections   | Relationships to other people, organizations, initiatives, places, issues, sources, and workspace artifacts.                      |

Atlas should make the confidence state visible. A profile backed by one old
source should feel different from a profile backed by multiple recent,
independent sources. The [trust guide](/docs/resources/trust) explains those
distinctions.

## What Atlas does not claim

Atlas does not decide who is important, endorse a group, verify every statement
inside a source, or turn a mention into a guarantee that a person is currently
active. Atlas organizes public evidence and gives users enough context to make a
judgment.

That boundary is especially important because Atlas publishes information about
real people. A confident-looking but weakly sourced record is worse than an
empty result. The product is designed to show uncertainty instead of hiding it.

## How people use Atlas

<Steps>
  <Step title="A public user searches">
    They search for housing organizers in Detroit, open a result, and check
    whether the profile has current source evidence.
  </Step>

  <Step title="A civic team builds a brief">
    A nonprofit entering Phoenix saves worker centers and tenant groups into a
    workspace, adds coverage gaps, and exports a source-linked briefing for a
    field team.
  </Step>

  <Step title="A developer builds an integration">
    A civic tech group uses the API to find transit organizations in Nevada, reads
    source evidence, and links records into a local dashboard.
  </Step>

  <Step title="An agent runs research">
    An MCP client or Scout workflow runs discovery, syncs results, and opens the
    run in Atlas so a human can review sources and visibility before acting.
  </Step>
</Steps>

## Why Rebuilding America maintains Atlas

Atlas is maintained by [The Rebuilding America Project](https://rebuildingus.org)
because the nonprofit's work depends on finding credible civic actors across
the country and making that knowledge reusable.

The platform is broader than one show, one organization, or one campaign. If
someone is doing good work anywhere in the country, Atlas should be able to help
people find it, verify it, and connect it to the broader network of public work.

## Start using Atlas

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Quickstart" icon="compass" href="/docs/quickstart-learn">
    Choose the public, team, or developer path.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Browse Atlas" icon="magnifying-glass" href="/docs/quickstart-browse">
    Walk through a public discovery example.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Trust and provenance" icon="shield-check" href="/docs/resources/trust">
    Understand what Atlas knows, how it knows it, and what it does not claim.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Build with Atlas" icon="code" href="/docs/api">
    Use the API, MCP server, Scout CLI, or self-hosting path.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>