Make American democracy legible.
Lobbyists have researchers, analysts, and communications professionals to translate public records into actionable intelligence. Ordinary citizens do not. Opus Populi closes that gap — mapping the relationships between representatives, their donors, and their votes on a federated network whose architecture mirrors American government itself.
The data is public. The asymmetry is structural.
American democracy produces an extraordinary volume of public information — voting records, campaign finance disclosures, meeting minutes, ballot measure texts, personal financial disclosures — and then makes it practically inaccessible to the citizens it is meant to serve.
The information asymmetry between professional lobbyists and ordinary citizens is not primarily a legal problem. The data is public. The asymmetry is structural: lobbyists employ researchers, analysts, and communications professionals to translate raw civic data into actionable intelligence. Citizens have no equivalent apparatus.
We're building that apparatus — and putting it in citizens' hands under an open-source license that cannot be quietly closed.
The Influence Graph
Representative. Donors. Votes. Conflicts. One lens on the relationships that shape every law that touches your life.
The Influence Graph is the platform's flagship view — an interactive map of who funds whom, who votes how, and where the alignment between donor industry and legislative outcome crosses from coincidence into pattern.
Donors and PACs visualized by contribution size and industry. Voting records cross-referenced against donor industry through semantic matching on bill content. Conflict-of-interest arcs surfaced algorithmically when alignment exceeds threshold.
It composes the underlying civic tools — proposition explorer, campaign finance tracker, representative directory, meeting calendar — into a single coherent view of how political money moves through American government.
The tools beneath the graph
Each works on its own. Together they compose the Influence Graph.
Campaign Finance Tracker
Graph coreSee exactly who funded what initiative. Contributions, expenditures, and outside spending — aggregated from state and federal databases.
Proposition Explorer
47 pages of legal text become a 5-minute interactive summary — with fiscal impact, arguments for and against, and the full source text always one click away.
Representative Directory
Enter your address. See every representative from city council to Congress — with bios, committee assignments, and built-in contact forms.
Meeting Calendar
Every public legislative meeting in your jurisdiction, searchable by body — with agendas, minutes, and video links.
Petition Scanner
AI-PoweredPoint your phone at a petition. Get an instant plain-language breakdown with automatic ballot measure matching.
Document Q&A
AI-PoweredUpload any civic document. Ask questions in plain English. Get answers with citations — processed on the node serving your community.
Built on the public record
One commitment that cannot be quietly revised: every civic data source is public domain.
Opus Populi's primary data sources — the Federal Election Commission, Congress.gov, and California's Cal-Access campaign finance database — are public domain. There is no downstream license to negotiate, no commercial reuse restriction to disclose, no provenance chain that breaks when a vendor changes terms.
This is a deliberate strategic decision. A civic transparency platform that depends on commercially-restricted civic data inherits the restrictions of its sources. Anyone can audit our data provenance. Anyone can replicate our pipelines. Methodological openness is the platform's strongest legal and political protection.
Public-domain data only
FEC, Congress.gov, Cal-Access. No commercially-restricted sources. An auditable provenance chain anyone can verify.
Open code, durable license
AGPL-3.0 with a dual commercial license. The civic commons stays open — mission drift is structurally constrained, not just promised.
Privacy by design
AI inference runs on the node serving your community. No third-party AI services. Location data is geo-fuzzed. Audit logs mask PII automatically.
Accessible to all
WCAG 2.2 AA compliant. Works offline as a progressive web app. English and Spanish.
Architecture that mirrors the republic
Federal, state, county, municipal. The data lives where the governance lives.
Opus Populi is not a centralized platform layered on top of civic data. It is a federated network whose architecture intentionally mirrors the hierarchical structure of American democratic governance.
A shared federal layer ingests Congress.gov and FEC data once. State nodes own their state legislative and campaign finance corpus. County and municipal operators progressively take over local jurisdictions as they come online.
Federation produces cross-jurisdictional pattern intelligence — donor networks that span states, model legislation that spreads simultaneously, astroturfing patterns invisible from any single county — that emerges from the network itself. No centralized scraper can replicate it.
Who it's for
Built for the people and institutions that already make democracy work — and for the citizens they serve.
Citizens
Read the ballot in plain language. See who funded the campaign. Find your representative. Show up to the meeting. Send the email with the public record cited inline.
See the Platform →Journalists & researchers
Cross-reference donor industries against voting records. Trace outside spending across measures. Query budget documents with citations.
Network Capabilities →Local operators
Run a certified node serving your state, county, or city. Connect your jurisdiction's data sources through declarative config — no scraper code required.
Operate a Node →Technology
Built entirely with open-source components. No proprietary dependencies.
Build with us.
Whether you're a citizen, a newsroom, or a regional operator — the network grows by who shows up. Run a node. Contribute code. Add your jurisdiction. Make American democracy a little more legible.