How GovTen stays honest
GovTen is published by CityData.AI, a company that sells software to local government. That is a real conflict, and the honest response is not to deny it but to build controls you can check — and to hand the enforcement to someone who does not work for us.
The ten things we hold ourselves to
No entry fee, at any stage
Not to nominate, not to be shortlisted, not to accept. There is no paid tier and no upgrade.
Judges named before nominations close
You know who will read your entry before you decide whether to write it.
Blind first round
Agency name, jurisdiction and any vendor names are redacted before judges see an entry.
The funnel is published
Nominations received, screened out, shortlisted and honoured — as numbers, every cycle, including the cycles that go badly.
A published no-sales-outreach policy
No sales or marketing action may be triggered by, timed to, or reference a GovTen award. The honoree list is not a sales input.
The publisher is ineligible
CityData.AI cannot be nominated and no CityData employee scores an entry.
Judges see no commercial pipeline
Judges have no access to CityData's customer or prospect data, in either direction.
Procurement-triggered suppression
An agency in a live procurement with CityData is suppressed from all CityData marketing for the duration — triggered by the procurement, never by the award.
Published conflict declarations
Every judge and the Chair declare relationships that could bear on an entry. Declarations are public.
The Chair can void a category
If a category cannot be judged cleanly, the independent Chair may withhold it. That authority is written into the Charter, not granted by us.
Assume everything is disclosable
In most jurisdictions we operate in, your correspondence with us is a public record. We design on that assumption.
That means we write to agencies as though the email will be published, we do not ask for anything we would not want disclosed, and we do not send anything that would embarrass a recipient if it appeared in a records request. If you need a communication handled differently for records reasons, say so and we will adapt.
It also means the reverse: if you ever want to know what we said to whom, ask. We will send you the correspondence.
What a sponsor buys, and what they cannot
Sponsorship covers trophies, plaques, shipping and captioning. That is the whole purpose of it.
A sponsor gets
- A logo position on the pages where sponsors appear
- Named acknowledgement in the annual report and ceremony
- Advance notice of the announcement date
A sponsor never gets
- Any role in nominations, screening, scoring or results
- Sight of entries, shortlists or results before publication
- A sponsored category, a named award, or placement of any kind
- Nominator or honoree contact details
Sponsors who sell to local government are accepted, and are subject to the same no-outreach rule as the publisher for the duration of the cycle. A sponsor that breaches it is removed and the removal is published.
Raising a concern
If you think a result was wrong, a control was breached, or someone used GovTen to sell you something, we want to hear it — and it should not have to come to us first.
To the Chair, not to us
Concerns about judging, conflicts or results go directly to the independent Chair at an address we do not monitor. The Chair decides what to do and records the decision in writing.
chair@govten.com — monitored by the Chair only. Live once the Chair is seated.
To us, for everything else
Sales contact you did not ask for, an invoice, a misuse of the badge, or a factual error on this site.
integrity@govten.com — answered within two working days.
If a control on this page is breached, we publish that it was breached, what happened, and what changed as a result — in the annual report of the cycle it occurred in. Not in a quiet update.