Open States Summit
See you in Chicago (or on Zoom) in January! Please RSVP now to participate in the 2023 Open States Summit, Jan 12-14!
This is an expansion of the summit we held last year. We’ll have another day of virtual talks about the project, and this time we’ve added two days of hackathon sessions! Here’s the agenda:
- Thursday, January 12: Livestream talks and discussion about the project and folks using our data (11am - 4pm US central)
- Introduction to Open States
- Future of the Project
- Highlight projects and people using Open States data
- Q&A with developers
- Friday, January 13: Hackathon - hybrid in-person and remote (10am to 6pm central)
- Saturday, January 14: Hackathon - hybrid in-person and remote (10am to 6pm central)
We’ll be in-person in Chicago, hosted at the University of Chicago by the Harris School’s Master of Science in Computational Analysis and Public Policy (MSCAPP) Program. Sign up to join us there, or join on the virtual track.
We definitely will have a couple of exciting announcements, and we’re really looking forward to introducing new people to the project. Please help us spread the word!
P.S. If you are doing something cool with our data or tools, this is a great time to reach out! We’d love to highlight your work and get to know you better.
Open States and Civic Eagle in 2023
Civic Eagle adopted Open States at the end of 2020. We’re a startup delivering policy intelligence tools to advocate groups, researchers, and corporations. We are founded on a vision to deliver accessible, insightful and attainable policy data and tech for the heroes of democracy. We believe democratic processes must be transparent and accessible. That’s what led us to contribute back to Open States in the first place, while most competitors do not.
Our focus has been on steadying the project, and re-opening classes of data that used to be included in the project (like Committees) but had been shelved for lack of resources.
This year we expanded our team substantially (see below), and that means we can get more ambitious about 2023. Please expect a couple big announcements about the future of Civic Eagle and Open States very soon - at the Summit in January!
2023 Session Status
As per usual for this time of year, we’ll be focusing for the next few months on 2023 data. If you’re looking to help out or follow along, our 2023 Tracker is the best place to look. So far, we have 19 jurisdictions where we’re ingesting bill data! Shout out to Tim Showers for helping out so much on that.
We’re currently starting the process of updating legislators to reflect the recent elections, which should be completed before the end of the year and will have monthly automatic updates moving forward. The Open States’ find-your-representatives tool (& related API endpoint) will be updated across jurisdictions before the end of the year as well.
Committee updates will start in December but will be ongoing as some jurisdictions may not update their websites until closer to session start.
New Folks on Team Open States
We’ve added more engineers to the team, here are a few more folks that will be contributing regularly to the Open States repos:
Sruthi Vedantham is a Junior Data Engineer with Civic Eagle. She currently lives in Chicago, where she is on a perpetual quest to find the best hot chocolate the city has to offer.
Sogo Ogundowole is Senior Data Engineer with Civic Eagle. He currently resides in Lagos, Nigeria, loves to play CoD and CoDM during his leisure time.
Christopher Yamas is a Junior Data Engineer with Civic Eagle. He currently resides in Chicago, where he strolls through the park daily (when he’s not fighting to keep the cats off his keyboard).
As always, you can get in touch via Slack, or by emailing us directly.