Making democracy more accessible and transparent is at the core of our mission. At Plural, we are committed to breaking down barriers and making legislative intelligence available to all. You’ve been able to research bills and subscribe to updates on Open States for years – it’s something we’re very proud of.
This month, Open States will relaunched under the Plural brand, with a more powerful set of features. This means faster fixes and improvements to these tools.
If you already have an Open States account, you will still be able to access your existing account through pluralpolicy.com/open. However, we recommend switching over to the new and more powerful tools available at Plural in early July.
If you don’t have an account, or haven’t used Open States in a while, make a free account through Plural! You’ll enjoy an improved experience and a brand-new set of professional public policy collaboration tools. These professional tools are how we continue to support the free version as well as our open data.
Once you create a free account and start using Plural, you can upgrade anytime. Plural’s AI-powered software allows public policy professionals to:
- Collaborate across teams with Workspaces
- Receive priority alerts and professional support
- Quickly identify bills in different jurisdictions that share similar text
- Discover which bills are likely to gain momentum, and adapt your strategy accordingly
Plural is perfectly suited for top performing policy professionals and teams.
A Big Year of Changes
2023 is shaping up to be a big year of changes for the Open States project. A lot of the ideas we brainstormed throughout the past few years, including those first announced in January, are finally coming to fruition. Change comes slow, and then it comes fast 🙂
Here’s the tl;dr:
- February: Our company rebranded as Plural (from Civic Eagle). Plural is the company that adopted Open States and has operated it since 2021.
- Right now: We’re working on a more powerful set of bill search and tracking features for our free Open States users. You will see these new features launch on Plural, and Open States will redirect to pluralpolicy.com/open. Plural becomes the most accessible and powerful policy intelligence platform! This will begin a migration process for existing Open States user accounts to equivalent Plural accounts.
- Later this summer: We will also strengthen our People and Committee data. This will continue to drive the “find your legislators” tool and open data offerings.
- December: We will sunset the v2 GraphQL API, in favor of the v3 API. v2 API users will need to migrate to v3.
- By the end of the year: we will sunset the Open States brand. Rest assured, Plural will provide the most accessible policy intelligence platform in the world. We are committed to supporting you, from free democracy tools, to open data, to powerful paid tools that support professional policy advocates.
What stays the same?
As promised in January, our commitment to providing free democracy tools to ALL people and to growing our open data core remains!
- Democracy tools: Search, track and subscribe to updates on legislation. This is free for individuals, as well as our find-your-legislator tool.
- Our open data: we provide bulk data and public data APIs for legislation, hearings, committees and elected officials.
- Open source code: web scrapers and related tools continue to be open source.
OpenStates.org to PluralPolicy.com
This is a big change for the project! Open States has a 13-year history of making a big impact, so we don’t make the change lightly. Here’s why we’re making the change:
- Our model for sustaining free tools and open data offerings is based on selling “pro”-level features to policy teams. We want the portion of our users who need fast collaboration to know they have an easy path to upgrade!
- We’ve maintained two software applications — Plural and Open States — that both do bill search and tracking. By migrating to one application, we can offer free users our best features while continuing to focus on continuous improvement.
- We are doing open data work outside of the United States, so the “States” part of the name is starting to make less sense. More on this soon!
We expect these changes to be a win for our users. We want to hear your questions and concerns to make sure we achieve that. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to share your thoughts.
What to Expect if You Use OpenStates to Find Your Legislators
You will find the same “Find Your Legislators” tool on Plural! If you have existing links to the tool, those will get redirected to the new URL automatically.
What to Expect if You Use OpenStates to Track Legislation
Bill search and tracking features will be better. One great example is searching bills by keyword: Plural’s search functionality is much better than the equivalent tool on OpenStates. Overall, you will be able to accomplish the same tasks.
If you already have an OpenStates account and subscribe to email updates, you’ll need to migrate to Plural. We’ll share detailed instructions on how to do so soon. In Plural, the same functionality is handled by a combination of tools:
- “Follow Bill” in OpenStates becomes “Track Bill” in Plural. Tracked bills trigger “Bill Update Notifications.”
- “Add a subscription” to a search becomes “Save Search”. You can then enable “Saved Search Alerts.”
- “Save Search” is a new feature in Plural, making it possible to save a search without receiving alerts about new results.
What to Expect if You Use OpenStates APIs
We will continue to provide public, open data APIs. You will continue to be able to manage your account through a login interface at pluralpolicy.com/open. However, this interface won’t be integrated with Plural on day one. It’ll be a little wonky for a bit as we continue to migrate layers of service.
If you use the API for a non-commercial project: you should expect no changes.
If you use the API for a commercial project: we are exploring ways to better support your needs. We’ve had a handful of requests for higher API limits, which are tough to support as a purely-free service. Please reach out if you are in this category — we would love to hear from you about your needs. Once we have a better sense of the need, we may proceed to announce a paid API tier for commercial users.
Sunset for the GraphQL API (API v2)
We introduced the GraphQL API for Open States data back in 2017. It’s had a good run, but the time has come to announce a sunset date: December 1, 2023.
If your code targets the GraphQL API, please make plans to adapt it to the v3 API before December 1st.
If you think there is missing functionality or data from the v3 API that will impede a smooth transition, please reach out.
We know it’s a pain to migrate an API client — we have a lot of experience with this from our data sources. But it’s a necessary step to take to simplify our API platform and management. The GraphQL API is very complicated, and it’s built into the OpenStates Django application, which we are working to retire. In contrast, the v3 API performs better and more predictably.
Next Steps for OpenStates Users
As a reminder, if you don’t have an account, or haven’t used Open States in a while, make a free account through Plural! You’ll enjoy an improved experience and a brand-new set of professional public policy collaboration tools. Plural’s AI-powered software allows public policy professionals to:
- Collaborate across teams with Workspaces
- Receive priority alerts and professional support
- Quickly identify bills in different jurisdictions that share similar text
- Discover which bills are likely to gain momentum, and adapt your strategy accordingly
