How DitchBook is built

This page documents the pipeline behind the directory, the map, and the statistics — what the sources are, how records are joined and verified, what we refuse to publish, and where the gaps are. It exists because a good question deserves a public answer: the numbers below are computed from the same data, in the same build, as the pages they describe.

The pipeline

1. Seed. The census began from the Open Water Foundation's Colorado ditch and reservoir companies dataset — open data, gratefully credited.
2. Census. The seed list is reconciled against the Colorado Secretary of State's business-entity data. Current census: 1,382 companies. It grows as candidates are verified — additions are checked against SoS records individually, never bulk-imported.
3. Monthly SoS refresh. A monthly pull of the SoS dataset re-joins standing, registered agent, and formation date by entity ID. Snapshots are kept, and the published "standings as of" date derives from the newest snapshot's own date (currently July 21, 2026) — never from the build clock, so a rebuild cannot dress stale standings up as fresh.
4. Water-rights matching. Companies are matched to their structures (WDIDs) in Colorado DWR's CDSS records. Only tier-1 matches are published — see the standard below. Currently 301 published matches, each carrying its water source, earliest decreed right, and a citation link to the state record.
5. The map. Pins are placed only at real DWR coordinates for a matched company's structure — never a town-centroid guess. 300 of the 301 matched companies are pinned; the remainder have no digitized coordinates in the state's data.
6. One-pass publication. Every company page, basin index, the map data, the stats, and this page are generated from the same joined dataset in a single build. A number quoted anywhere on the site cannot disagree with the page it links to, because they are the same data. Builds hard-fail if a data source comes up short (a sparse map or a standings join covering less than half the census refuses to ship).

What "tier 1" means

A company-to-WDID match is published only when the state's own records assert it. The match key is the DWR structure record's associated-contacts field — the state's note of which organization is tied to the structure — which must equal the company's registered name exactly after mechanical normalization (case, punctuation, generic legal words; no fuzzy matching in anything published). Three guards then apply: the normalized name must map to exactly one registered company in the census (name collisions demote both candidates), all of a match's structures must sit in a single county (multi-county spread is the signature of a generic name conflating unrelated entities), and only ditch/reservoir-type structures are eligible (a company appearing as a secondary contact on a well must not be credited with the well's rights — a guard added after our own audit caught precisely that failure). A fuzzy name-similarity tier exists in the pipeline for review purposes and is never published. Every published row carries a citation URL to the underlying state record. When post-publication review finds a conflict, the match is demoted and unpublished: on July 21, 2026 an internal audit demoted three previously published matches over basin conflicts. We treat the demotions as part of the record — a verifier with no public refusals is a rubber stamp.

The numbers right now

Companies in the census

1,382

Matched to a current SoS record

1,357 (98%) — standings as of July 21, 2026

Published tier-1 water matches

301

Companies pinned on the map

300

Known gaps, stated plainly

• 25 census companies have no row in the current SoS pull — typically a name or registration mismatch still being reconciled, not a judgment about the company.
• Roughly 1,100 further SoS entities are candidates for the census and await individual verification before inclusion; the census understates the true population until that triage completes.
• The SoS status "Exists" is displayed as the state records it — it is not the same as "Good Standing," and we don't conflate them.
• Water matching is deliberately conservative: many true company-to-structure relationships remain unpublished because they haven't yet cleared the tier-1 bar. The backlog is verification time, not missing data.
• Basin assignment prefers the census's IBCC basin field; where blank, it derives from the DWR water division of the matched structure, and companies with neither appear under "Other."

Corrections

If anything on this site is wrong, tell us — corrections ship same-day, and material ones are noted rather than silently overwritten. Missing companies are added the same day they're verified.

Maintainer, disclaimer, and citing this work

This registry is maintained by Nick Davis (DitchBook, Loveland, Colorado — nick@getditchbook.com). It is a compilation of public records offered in good faith, with citations so any claim can be checked at its source; DitchBook is not affiliated with any listed company, the State of Colorado, or DARCA, and nothing here is a warranty — verify against the cited state record before relying on a row for any consequential purpose. Suggested citation: “DitchBook, Colorado ditch company registry, getditchbook.com/methods/, records as of July 21, 2026.”