Influence Texas (Open Austin)
Summary
Influence Texas is a nonpartisan, open-source civic-tech project built by the Open Austin brigade during ATX Hack for Change (June 2-4, 2017). It links Texas state legislators’ campaign finance records to their voting records into a single mobile-friendly web application, so citizens can see whose money may be influencing a politician’s votes. [source: influence-texas]
Body
The project’s origin is the ATX Hack for Change weekend in early June 2017, organised under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16 (peace, justice and strong institutions) — every 2017 ATX Hack for Change project was aligned to UN SDGs [source: influence-texas]. The project was started by Amy M. Mosley, described as a former investigative reporter frustrated by a fruitless search for fact-based, unbiased sources during the 2016 US election cycle [source: influence-texas]. It was developed with three team members enrolled in the Mozilla Open Leaders Training Program, and the project’s stated principles map to the Mozilla Manifesto — explicitly citing principle 10 (“Magnifying the public benefit aspects of the Internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment”) [source: influence-texas].
The product is described as “a mobile-first responsive web app (with an advanced-user desktop version planned for future releases) that puts campaign finance and voting records in a usable format so citizens can see how money is influencing the political process” [source: influence-texas]. The data model explicitly joins two fields: campaign-finance records (whose money is influencing a politician) and voting records (how the politician voted) [source: influence-texas]. The project’s framing is that “the cornerstone of democracy rests on the foundation of an educated electorate” (a Thomas Jefferson quote used in the project copy) [source: influence-texas].
Methodologically, Influence Texas distinguishes itself from comparator tools like FollowTheMoney.org on three axes they consider missing there: (1) the source of the data, (2) how fresh the data is, and (3) the matching methodology for associating monetary donations with industry segments — and the project also notes FollowTheMoney offers no voting-records layer [source: influence-texas].
The project’s nonpartisan commitments are explicit in its stated principles: it “will never advocate for or affiliate itself with a political party” and “is an inclusive organization that welcomes people of all political persuasions — including Democrats, Republicans, and independents” [source: influence-texas]. The project says it advocates “curiosity over judgment” and is “willing to be surprised” [source: influence-texas]. A Code of Conduct and a MANIFESTO are listed as pre-engagement reading [source: influence-texas].
The live application URL published on the project README is app.influencetexas.com, with the project’s main site at influencetexas.com [source: influence-texas]. The project is hosted on GitHub under the Open Austin organisation [source: influence-texas].
Use it for
Pointing a civic-tech team to a working open-source Texas legislative accountability tool that combines campaign-finance and voting-record data; sourcing a nonpartisan civic-tech standard statement (“never affiliate with a political party”, “curiosity over judgment”) for a coalition’s independence declaration; using the Influence-Texas data-model framing (campaign finance + voting records as joined data) when designing comparable accountability projects in other US states.
Related
- civic-tech
- civil-resistance
- digital-security
- distributed-organizing
- framing-and-narrative
- petitions-and-e-campaigning
- power-mapping
- theory-of-change
- three-and-a-half-percent-rule
Sources & verification
- sources/influence-texas — grounding: primary — RAW (5,551 chars; web.archive.org scrape of github.com/open-austin/influence-texas README, 2025-04-25)