Frequently asked.

Agora is civic infrastructure for participation between elections. Enter a US address and it shows the officials who represent you and what they are working on: bills, votes, budgets and hearings, drawn from official records with plain-language summaries. You can respond in structured ways, and offices that join can see what their own district said.

No. Every official, of every party, gets the same profile and the same tools. Nothing on Agora is ranked by engagement or promoted, and party is shown as text, never as a colour.

No. Agora is not a campaign tool, a fundraising platform, or an engagement machine. It is civic infrastructure, and it is deliberately none of those things.

Two co-founders, Tomer Rozenberg and Yishai Stern. Agora is an independent civic project, independent of any government body. You can read more about us, or send either of us a message, on the About page.

The alpha is live and open to anyone in the US. The quickest way in is the tour, which starts with a quick sign-up. More countries come next.

Yes. Following your officials and responding to them needs a sign-up, so your responses can be counted in your own district. The tour starts with the same quick sign-up.

Anywhere in the US: every address shows its member of the House and both Senators. State and city government goes deepest in New York, where we started. California and Texas come next.

Civic infrastructure has to be proven somewhere real before it scales. Agora is a working alpha open to anyone in the United States, and New York is the first rung: state and city coverage goes deepest there, anchored in New York City, where the open data, the multi-tier government, the density of officials, and the civic-tech community all sit in one place. California and Texas come next.

Not yet. The alpha covers US officials only. Join the list and we'll tell you when Agora reaches more countries.

Offices post, once a person on our side has checked that the office is who it says it is. Citizens take part in structured ways: saying where they stand on a bill, weighing in on how a budget is split, sending a question to a town hall. They don't post.

Civic tools that let citizens post at each other became social media with worse moderation. Tying every conversation to an official's actual work keeps the platform civic.

From official sources: Congress.gov and the Congressional Record for Congress, NY Open Legislation for the New York State Legislature, and Legistar for the New York City Council, among others. Our page on how we get our data lists every source and how often each one updates.

Where an official summary exists, we show it and name its source. Where none exists for a federal bill, we show a summary written by AI from the bill text, labelled as an AI summary. It is replaced as soon as an official one appears.

No. Offices never see your name or anything that identifies you. They see totals for their district, counted separately from responses outside it once enough people have responded, and the reasons and questions people chose to write, without names.

Very little, and no cookies for tracking. Our privacy policy lists exactly what we store, why, and for how long.

Yes. Every official we cover already has a profile built from public records. Start by talking to us; a person on our side checks each claim by hand. Our page for officials and offices explains what an office gets.

No. Agora doesn't forward anything to an office's inbox. Responses are counted on the platform, and an office that has claimed its profile reads them there.

A set of sourced post-mortems of civic platforms that tried to connect people with their elected officials, with the recurring patterns behind why most of them ended. It's on the site at /civic-tech-history.

Yes. The whole set downloads as JSON or CSV under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Credit it and link back.