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. https://t.co/fM19p1IgR4

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!

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. https://t.co/1Hk677soj6

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.

In order to develop this work, we are pursuing a data strategy aimed at sustaining this work so we can continue to expand. In some countries, policy data is not publicly & digitally available at all. That’s a hard problem with real cost associated to solve.

Today we officially announced our expansion into data work in Africa! https://t.co/JZQzdspiTO 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?

An updated and even more entertaining version of Rylie's talk on the Hellscape of Scraping Legislative Data - check it out! https://t.co/2m2iD4RVcv (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:

Big changes have launched! Our new set of free bill & legislator tracking tools are live at https://t.co/KZ7VgVkMMz! You can still get to the old Open States application at https://t.co/Q31ybuxGVU to access your existing account :)

This is the week! This Friday, we're re-launching the free democracy tools of https://t.co/g4JneYBbT3 onto https://t.co/KZ7VgVkMMz! Open data stays open, and folks searching / tracking bills will have improved tools. Read more:

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.

Plural adopted Open States a couple years ago, and these changes are part of our plan to make a bigger impact than ever with open data. Our data focus will be bigger than the United States by the end of the year, which is why we'll also be sunsetting the Open States brand by 2024

If you consume our open data through bulk downloads or APIs, rest assured we will continue to provide and expand that data. BUT if you are depending on the GraphQL API (v2), please note that we plan to sunset that at the end of the year. Please reach out to share any concerns!

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 https://t.co/KZ7VgVkMMz - read more about the plans at our latest blog entry: