Overview & Roadmap

Open States is a fairly large & somewhat complex project comprised of many moving parts with a long history.

As you look to contribute, it may be beneficial to understand a little bit about the various components.

Repositories

These repositories make up the core of the project, if you’re looking to contribute there’s a 90% chance one of these is what you’re looking for.

These repositories are other pieces of our infrastructure, but are generally not interesting to the average person.

2020 Roadmap

Our current priorities:

Power User Features

  • Add user logins & profiles. (launched January 2020)
  • Introduce bill & issue tracking. (launched February 2020)

Data Quality

  • Improve data quality and timeliness. (in progress)
  • Provide publicly accessible data quality dashboard. (Q3)

API

  • Improve speed of most popular graph queries. (launched June 2020)
  • Provide simplified endpoints for common queries. (Q3/Q4)
  • Introduce a pub/sub type mechanism for staying in sync with bill & vote updates. (Q4/2021Q1)

Bulk Data

  • Add new per-state CSV data exports. (launched February 2020)
  • <s>Add custom data-export creation page.</s> (replaced with per-session JSON data instead, February 2020)
  • Provide bulk geographic data ahead of 2021 redistricting. (Q4)

Community

  • Documentation updates (Q3)
  • New Contributor Support (Q3/Q4)
  • API User Dashboard (launched March 2020)

Recent Major Work

To give a sense of recent priorities, here are major milestones from the past few years: