Open States

Meet Max, our Senior Policy Expert! 🚀 Max is a key driving force between many aspects of Plural, including #CX, #marketing, and #product. Learn more about how he uses expertise in #publicpolicy to provide value to our customers and business 👇

The 2020 #election heightened focus on various #voting topics, including: ✔️ Felon disenfranchisement ✔️ Automatic/same-day #voterregistration ✔️ #disinformation ✔️ Legislature modernization As we near #ElectionDay, understanding these issues is crucial. hubs.li/Q02wXXsk0

Want to join our team working on public policy intelligence tools and providing open data on legislation? We have a Lead Web Engineer position open now! pluralpolicy.com/wp-content/upl…

Heads up to our open data API users! We will be doing database maintenance this Sunday, March 3 at 6pm US Central time. Please expect a short downtime for API access. Thank you for your patience!

We are hiring a part-time Legislative Research intern for Jan - March. This position helps ensure the quality of our open data. If you are interested or want to share the opportunity, please reply/DM and we can share more!

🚀 Plural’s recent report on legislation impacting #ESG investing was cited by @Forbes! ESG-related legislation has become part of the political “culture war” across the country. Over 2/3 of states have considered anti-ESG legislation this year. hubs.li/Q020yYTW0

@maggie_a_lee @GaPolBot You are welcome! Sounds like a great tool! We’re so happy every time we see our open data put to use for transparency!

But in other countries there is digitally published policy data. In that context we will shortly publish open data and open source scrapers as normal. We’ll have more news as we release that for new jurisdictions.

So in the short term, data that comes from that context will be closed. We are pursuing partners who can help fund the work so that we can open it. If you know someone we should talk to please reach out! Our goal is to eventually open all fundamental democratic data.

Today we officially announced our expansion into data work in Africa! pluralpolicy.com/news/plural-ex… this is work we’ve teased earlier this year. Our next announcement will come when we have our first open data published (South Africa).

A new talk by Jesse (CTO) and Obinna (VP of Africa) on Democracy, Data and Danger. What are the challenges we face to making a positive democratic impact with open and transparent data, in an opaque and dis-informative world? youtu.be/FqX0zDjiPyk

An updated and even more entertaining version of Rylie's talk on the Hellscape of Scraping Legislative Data - check it out! youtube.com/watch?v=Dd4JpC… (belatedly from Minnebar conference in April)

Related to launch, the GraphQL API is experiencing a issue that we're working to address right now. If you encounter that issue, you can also change your API endpoint URL to: open.pluralpolicy.com/graphql

Big changes have launched! Our new set of free bill & legislator tracking tools are live at pluralpolicy.com! You can still get to the old Open States application at open.pluralpolicy.com to access your existing account :)

This is the week! This Friday, we're re-launching the free democracy tools of openstates.org onto pluralpolicy.com! Open data stays open, and folks searching / tracking bills will have improved tools. Read more: blog.openstates.org/2023-june-chan…

Happy to take questions on here, over email, Github or Slack about the transition!

This begins the process of truly uniting this open data work within Plural, so that our free and paying users alike get better features, faster fixes, and growing data and insights. Open States has an incredible legacy, and we will honor that legacy under the Plural name.

2023 is shaping up as a big year of changes for Open States. In just a few weeks, we'll be launching a new version of our free democracy tools on pluralpolicy.com - read more about the plans at our latest blog entry: blog.openstates.org/2023-june-chan…