How to use this. What we promise. What we don’t.

Five short sections, no legalese. Read this once; you can link to it later if you ever need to remember the rules.

Section 01 — What this is

Civic information, not legal advice

CivicRadar surfaces legislation that might affect you and helps you tell your representatives what you think about it. That’s the whole product.

What it is not: legal advice, immigration advice, medical advice, tax advice, or a substitute for talking with a qualified professional about a real decision in your life. If a bill summary or generated letter looks like it’s answering a legal or medical question, please double-check with someone who’s qualified to give that answer.

Section 02 — Bill data

Best-effort, not authoritative

Bill text, status, sponsors, and roll-call votes come from OpenStates, LegiScan, and Congress.gov. We refresh our cache on a monthly schedule with weekly top-ups. That means the data here can lag the legislature by hours to days, especially during fast-moving sessions.

For anything that matters — a deadline, a hearing, a vote — confirm against the state legislature’s own website before you act. The methodology page lists where each piece of data comes from and links to the upstream source.

When we know data is stale or missing, we say so on the page. We won’t serve you a half-fresh result and let you assume it’s current.

Section 03 — Your words

The message you draft belongs to you

We help you draft a letter or call script. We don’t claim any rights in it. Send it, edit it, copy it, give it to a friend — it’s yours.

We don’t persist the text on our servers. Once you close the tab without saving, the draft is gone. The privacy page goes into more detail about which API the text travels to and what happens to it there.

Section 04 — Licensing

The code is open. The curated dataset isn’t.

The CivicRadar codebase is licensed under AGPLv3. You can read it, fork it, run it yourself. If you run a modified version as a service, AGPLv3 requires you to publish your changes — same terms we hold ourselves to.

The curated dataset of advocacy-org positions on specific bills — the thing that makes identity-aware matching work — is not under the same license. That dataset is the result of ongoing curation work by CivicRadar; redistribution is reserved. The scraping logic in the public repository is open, but the curated outputs are not for republication.

Bill text itself is in the public domain and comes from government sources. Nothing in these terms tries to restrict your use of the public-record portions of what you see.

Section 05 — Warranty and contact

No warranty. Real contact path.

We work hard to make this useful and we’ll fix problems quickly when we see them. But CivicRadar is provided as-is, with no warranty of fitness for any particular use. We’re not responsible for losses that follow from acting on something you read here. Same shape as every other piece of free public-interest infrastructure you’ve ever used.

If something is wrong — a bug, a broken link, a privacy concern, an org we should remove or add — the fastest path is the public GitHub issue tracker linked from the footer. The about page lists the other ways to reach us.

If these terms change, we’ll list the change at the top of this page so you can see what shifted. No silent edits.