or "Open Source Political Intelligence: what is it? And why does it matter?"
"What is even happening right now?"
It's a question many of us ask as we navigate today's information and especially political landscape. News cycles shift rapidly, narratives are constructed and reconstructed, and the framing of issues influences public perception as much as the facts themselves.
Our approach begins with a rephrased version of this essential question:
"How can we gather, measure, classify, review, and analyse developments with accuracy and transparency?"
The modern information ecosystem is designed to capture attention. Social media and traditional news operate under the same rule: attention is the most valuable currency. From emotionally charged headlines to the topics that go unmentioned, everything competes for your focus.
Navigating political landscapes — understanding key players, their motives, and how narratives get shaped — remains difficult. There are countless sources, actors, and interests shaping the discourse. For those who actively read and compare news, patterns start to emerge — but at scale, tracking these influences requires different infrastructure.
"Who wants your attention where, and why?"
The tools for systematic analysis exist, but they've historically been available only to well resourced institutions. We're building them as public infrastructure — open, transparent, and customisable for anyone who wants to analyse political information at scale.
Open source communities have already built many advanced capabilities. We're assembling them into coherent infrastructure that's accessible to the public.
Raw data is meaningless without the right interface. User experience and interface design matter as much as the analytical methods. Different questions need different views — tables, visualisations, maps, or raw exports. The platform adapts.
For details on how the platform works, see our project manifest.
This project emerged from research at the Otto Suhr Institute (Freie Universität Berlin). Working with my professor there, the need became clear: better tools to analyse political information systematically — frameworks that could be applied at scale, methods that could be made transparent and reproducible. The gap between what research infrastructure could theoretically do and what was actually accessible was too large to ignore.
While solving that specific problem, we realised the challenge wasn't unique to political science. Anywhere natural language meets data — journalism, policy analysis, legal research, organisational documentation, regulatory monitoring — the same pattern exists. People have analytical expertise in their heads but lack infrastructure to apply it at scale.
What began as tooling for a studentt's needs became general purpose infrastructure. Almost by accident, we'd built something that serves any field where you need to extract meaning from unstructured information.
We've presented our core methodology at APSA 2024 (Philadelphia) and PEIO 2025 (Harvard). Transparent methodology means others can critique, test, and improve our work. We invite you to do the same for this project.
If you want to contribute, learn more or want to get to know us:
Get in touch:
Email: engage@open-politics.org
Founder: Jim Vincent Wagner
LinkedIn: Open Politics
GitHub: open-politics
Mastodon/Bluesky: @openpoliticsproject