Summary
Influence Texas is the Open-Austin civic-tech project that publishes structured, open-data dossiers on Texas state legislators — money in politics, voting records, lobbying ties, public statements — designed to give journalists, researchers, and citizens a single starting point for legislative accountability research.
Body
Influence Texas treats Texas legislative data as civic data: legislator profiles are built from a normalised schema pulling from the Texas Legislature Online vote records, Texas Ethics Commission filings (campaign finance and lobby registrations), and supplementary open datasets. Each legislator page exposes the raw data sources, the calculations, and the methodology for any derived score. [source: influence-texas]
The project’s explicit discipline is to make the legislative-data layer reusable: the project publishes its data-extraction scripts, the dossier schemas, and its methodology docs so adjacent state projects (Open North Carolina, Open Alabama) can fork the model. [source: influence-texas]
Influence Texas serves primarily as a journalistic and accountability tool — it is cited by Texas reporters, civic-engagement organisations, and legislative-scorecard projects. It also doubles as a working example of open-civic-tech for legislatures outside Texas that lack such infrastructure. [source: influence-texas]
Use it for
Citing the open-civic-tech methodology in legislative-transparency work; pointing a civic-tech team to a working example of a state-level legislator dossier; using the Influence-Texas model when designing a similar accountability project in a different jurisdiction.