How GovTen stays honest
Judging is done by unpaid volunteers with no commercial interest in the outcome, and enforcement sits with an independent Chair. Every control below is either a written policy the Chair can enforce, a technical control, or a number we publish — so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
The eight 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.
An independent Chair, named and accountable
The Chair is named on this site, is not an employee or contractor of the program administrator, and holds final authority over judging.
Blind first round
Agency name, jurisdiction and any vendor names are redacted before judges see an entry.
The funnel stats are published
Nominations received, screened out, shortlisted and honored — as numbers, every cycle.
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 program administrator is ineligible
The program administrator CityData.AI cannot nominate an agency, cannot influence results, and no CityData employee scores an entry.
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 both trophies, shipping and captioning. That is the whole purpose of it.
A sponsor gets
- A logo position on the pages where sponsors appear
- Named acknowledgment 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 program administrator 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.
To the Chair
Concerns about judging, conflicts or results go directly to the independent Chair, who then decides what to do and records the decision in writing.
chair@govten.com
To the Admin
Concerns about factual errors on the site, sales or marketing outreach you did not ask for, a misuse of the badge, or similar matters go directly to the program administrator.
integrity@govten.com
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.