Track legislation across 50 states and congress!
I've been building LegisTrack — a tool for following legislation across all 50 states and Congress — and wanted to share it here since this community actually cares about the guts of civic tech.
The problem I kept hitting: state legislation is impossibly fragmented. 50 sites, 50 data formats, dense bill text, and no easy way to see the bigger patterns. So I tried to fix a few things at once:
- Bill DNA (the part I'm most proud of): it detects when a near-identical bill turns up in 5+ statehouses — the tell-tale sign of model legislation drafted once and introduced everywhere. You get a map of where a bill is "spreading." Genuinely eye-opening to watch.
- Follow the Money: pulls top donor industries for a bill's sponsor straight from official campaign-finance disclosures (20+ states + FEC so far).
- AI summaries + Q&A: plain-language explanations of dense bills, and you can ask any bill a question.
- A personalized "For You" feed: describe who you are, and it surfaces the bills that actually affect you with a one-line reason why — then drafts a message to your legislators you review and send.
- Real-time alerts on status changes, hearings, and votes.
Data comes from OpenStates + LegiScan; cross-state similarity is done with Postgres full-text + trigram matching (pg_trgm/tsvector) rather than anything fancy, which has held up surprisingly well. Stack is React/Node/Postgres, self-hosted.
It's live on the web (legis-track.com) and an iOS app is in App Store review now.
I'd genuinely love feedback from people who work in/around gov tech — especially on the model-legislation detection (false positives, edge cases) and what data sources or features would make this actually useful in your work. Happy to answer anything about how it's built.