Open States Information

OpenGovernment is a free and open-source public resource website for government transparency and civic engagement at the state and local levels. The site is a non-partisan joint project of two 501(c)3 non-profit organizations, the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation. OpenGovernment is independent from any government entity, candidate for office, or political party. The information contained on OpenGovernment pages, wherever applicable, is cited to a primary source-- while we aggregate many different data sources, we do not edit or manipulate government data in any way before presenting it here. OpenGovernment comes from the team that brought you OpenCongress.org, a leading web tool for government transparency in the federal U.S. Congress. Conceived in 2004, the main problem that OpenCongress sought to address was a lack of accessible information online about bills, votes, and issues in the U.S. Congress. The official website of Congress, THOMAS, published raw data about legislation, but not in ways that are compliant with the community-generated Principles of Open Government Data, not in sufficiently timely ways, and not on webpages that were proven to be user-friendly. (More than 15 years after THOMAS' launch, it still doesn't come close to doing any of these things.