Data sources & licences

CivilGate collects official, public information and explains it. This page lists where each dataset comes from, the licence it’s used under, and the credit we show wherever it appears.

CivilGate is independent. It is not run by, affiliated with or endorsed by any parliament, government or the organisations listed below.

What is ours, and what isn’t

From the sources: the laws and bills themselves, vote results and how each member voted. We don’t change them.

CivilGate’s own work, labelled as such: the plain-English summaries and impact scores (written by AI, which can make mistakes — see how scoring works), and the voting analysis on the trends page (narrow vs clear votes, party unity, who votes together, who breaks ranks).

How parliaments voted

Postcode lookups

Used only when you type a postcode to find your representative. The lookup runs in your browser; we keep only the resulting area, on your device.

Laws and documents

The laws, bills and official documents come from each government’s official publication service — the full list, with links, is on the coverage page. Each record links to the original. The licence terms of every publication service are being recorded one by one; if you represent one of them and have a question, please get in touch.

The AI reads the official text of each law to write its summary and scores. Those texts come from, among others:

Basado en datos de la Agencia Estatal Boletín Oficial del Estado (boe.es)
Japan: e-Gov 法令検索 (laws.e-gov.go.jp), Government of Japan Standard Terms of Use
Légifrance / DILA and the Assemblée nationale, Licence Ouverte (etalab-2.0) · Folketingstidende (Kilde: Folketinget) · Sveriges riksdag · Stortinget (NLOD) · GOV.UK and legislation.gov.uk (Open Government Licence v3.0) and UK Parliament (Open Parliament Licence v3.0) · U.S. Congressional Research Service summaries and the Federal Register (public domain) · Australia: Federal Register of Legislation (legislation.gov.au), © Commonwealth of Australia, CC BY 4.0 · Austria: Rechtsinformationssystem des Bundes (ris.bka.gv.at), CC BY 4.0 · EU: © European Union, EUR-Lex / Publications Office (eur-lex.europa.eu) · Ireland: Houses of the Oireachtas, Oireachtas (Open Data) PSI Licence (CC BY 4.0)
Canada: Parliament of Canada, LEGISinfo (parl.ca/legisinfo). Reproduced for non-commercial purposes; this is not an official version.

Open Database License (ODbL) data

Australian votes come from They Vote For You (OpenAustralia Foundation) under the Open Database License. The Australian vote data we derive from it (the per-vote member lists and the Australian figures in our voting analysis) is likewise available under the ODbL. Postcode data from Zippopotam.us is also ODbL.

Personal data

About members of parliament we store only what their parliament publishes about them in their public role: name, party, constituency and how they voted. About visitors, see the cookie settings (analytics only with your consent); anything you save or a postcode area you look up stays on your own device.

Flag icons

Country flags are drawn with the “Twemoji Country Flags” font (TalkJS polyfill, MIT), a subset of Twemoji Mozilla. Twemoji graphics © Twitter, Inc. and other contributors, licensed CC-BY 4.0. They are used only so flags look the same in every browser.