Work
KnowGov: free, nonpartisan civic intelligence
What KnowGov is
KnowGov, at knowgov.info, is a free, nonpartisan civic intelligence platform built by Blacksky. Its promise is in its tagline: Understand. Power. Act. It helps people understand their government, see how power actually works, and take informed action. No ads, no opinions, just data.
KnowGov launched on July 4, 2026, and the full site went live in September 2026.
Status: Live and growing. Role: Built and run by Blacksky; Mario Moorhead is founder and principal engineer. Ebon Heath, Mario's longtime creative partner, co-created the interface.
Why it exists
Government information is public, but it is scattered across agency sites, PDFs, databases and news, and most people never get past the headline. KnowGov puts it in one place, in plain language, and connects it: an official to their votes, a bill to its journey through Congress, an issue to the money and the coverage around it. The aim is that anyone, starting from nothing more than a ZIP code, can find who represents them and what those people are doing.
Where it came from
KnowGov grew out of Poly Sci Fi, an earlier Blacksky platform that tracked every member of Congress and set out to turn passive news readers into active participants. KnowGov kept that idea, data over spin and action over outrage, and took it much further: every level of government, full bill text and voting records, elections, balanced news, and an agent you can ask.
What you can do on KnowGov
- Find your officials by ZIP code. Federal, state and city: members of Congress, governors, mayors, and state legislators in a growing list of states.
- Follow bills. Read the full text, follow each bill's journey through committees, hearings and votes, and see how your own representatives voted at each step.
- See voting records. Full voting records for members of the current Congress, with missed votes and party-line voting on each profile.
- Election Mode. Thousands of candidates for the 2026 midterms, by ZIP code, with the elections on your ballot and polling where it exists.
- Read the news across the spectrum. Headlines are grouped by what they are about, with several different outlets' stories on each, and a marker when a story has multiple independent reports.
- The Data Lab. Experiments with the data: a national coverage map, polls you can sort and drill into, and a weekly calendar of what is happening in government.
- Follow the money. Campaign funding for officials, starting at the federal level, is being added now.
The scale
As of October 2026, KnowGov holds about 131,000 bills, 3,800 officials, 76 issues and more than 11.9 million documents, and it grows every day through automated daily intake from official public sources.
How it is built
KnowGov runs on Prism, Blacksky's tiered data layer: raw records, structured records, search by meaning, and cold storage. Every record comes from public, official sources, and state records are kept separate from federal ones so nothing is mislabeled. News is ingested with its outlet recorded, so coverage can be balanced across viewpoints rather than drawn from one side.
Shirley, a civic agent built on AgentOS, answers questions about government from KnowGov's data. She reads from Prism and never changes it.
An iPhone and Apple Watch app is in testing, with a personal view of what changed since you last looked and widgets for the home and lock screens.
Principles
- Free and nonpartisan. No ads, no opinions, no paywall.
- Real data only. Nothing is invented, and headlines are never rewritten.
- Coverage over perfection. KnowGov adds what can be had reliably and factually, starting where the most people live, and fills in the rest over time.
What KnowGov shows about Blacksky
KnowGov is Blacksky's core offer at full scale: taking an enormous, scattered body of material and making it something people can explore and talk to. The same pieces are available to clients: Prism for the data, AgentOS for the agent, Black Cloud to host it.
Supporting KnowGov
KnowGov is free to use. People who want to help keep it running can contribute through the Support page on knowgov.info.