To our valued Open States community,
Thank you for your support in 2023! With your help, we’ve enhanced our bill tracking tools and welcomed over 1500 new users. Our commitment to accessible legislative tracking continues strong into 2024. Read on for more updates and improvements to Open States in 2024.
Update on Plural’s Free Bill Tracking
In June we launched the new version of our free democracy tools, including updated versions of the Find My Representatives and Bill Tracking tools that have historically been provided on openstates.org. These tools are built on the same technology that we offer to our customers, including much better search functionality around keywords found in bill text.
We’re happy to announce that over 1500 new users have created accounts to use our free bill tracking functionality since we launched! This is in addition to many more who have used the features to search and view bill data without logging in, which is available from our homepage.
If you need bill tracking functionality in 2024, pluralpolicy.com is your place to go! We are still working on a solution to help speed up the process of migrating a legacy open.pluralpolicy.com bill tracking account into a pluralpolicy.com account. Once we do that, we’ll announce a timeline for shutting down the legacy application.
Legislative Sessions 2024
Work is well underway to pull in data for legislative sessions in 2024. Many sessions have prefiled data already! In addition to finding data from new legislative sessions through the Plural bill search and tracking app, you can also find it in our ongoing open data offerings:
- Open API v3: https://v3.openstates.org/docs
- Bulk data: https://open.pluralpolicy.com/data/
GraphQL API (v2) Now Deprecated
We previously announced in June that we planned to sunset the GraphQL API (API v2, found at https://open.pluralpolicy.com/graphql).
The GraphQL API is now officially deprecated. Please change any code that currently targets the GraphQL API, to instead target the newer v3 API (https://v3.openstates.org/docs).
However, the timeline to actually remove the GraphQL functionality has been pushed back due to changes in our team’s priorities. We do not currently have a drop-dead date for when that API will be taken offline. However, our intention is still to establish a timeline to do so sometime in 2024. If you have code that is critical for 2024 sessions, please work expeditiously to convert it to target the v3 API.
Open Data Summit 2024 – Your Ideas Requested!
At the beginning of 2023, we hosted a one-day virtual summit highlighting our policy data roadmap and featuring several people doing cool stuff with our open policy data, as well as a hybrid hackathon on our open source scraper code.
That experience was beneficial in a bunch of ways, but also was tricky to pull off right in the heart of the start of legislative sessions 😅 – so this year we’re looking forward to something closer to March to invite the community back. Stay tuned for an exact date!
We’d love to get your ideas for our 2024 summit: please take a moment to share your thoughts here!
- Do you have a research, data, or software project that uses our open legislative data in some way? We’d love to hear talk about how to highlight it
- Is there an intersection of public policy work and data that you find compelling or curious?
- Is there any technical information or training that would help you better contribute to or make use of our open data offerings?
Please share your ideas or questions here!
2023 Year in Review
At the beginning of the year we shared our roadmap. Well, time to see how we did!
2023 definitely posed challenges for Plural: we had an ambitious plan to launch our new brand, do application migrations, and eventually had to face an economic environment that got very tough for startups.
| 2023 Goal | Result |
| The data we provide here will remain free | Success! |
| We are committed to growing that open data core, for example adding legislative data from jurisdictions in Africa! | Handling a census/redistricting year ended up being VERY challenging, and ate up a bunch of time. While we made data improvements in several areas (such as geocoding), we were not able to launch our planned open scrapers in Africa. |
| We will be rebranding soon, and incorporating our open data offerings into that brand | Success! |
| We will continue to provide features like bill search and the find-your-reps tool, but some will be folded into a free offering inside our newer, proprietary codebase (new features incoming!) | This launched successfully, with over 1500 new users signed up for free accounts since the launch. |
| If you are building a project against our API, it is recommended to use API v3. That API will remain available. | Still true 🙂 |
Create a Free Account
Create a free account today! Gain access to the same best-in-class legislative data, searching, and tracking you’re used to with Open States. Plus, you’ll unlock more advanced features to help you and your team navigate the complex policy landscape.
