Cite Oravan
Every bill on Oravan has one permanent address, a dated freshness stamp and a clear line between the official record and plain language written by AI. This page explains what each of those means for reporters, librarians and anyone building on Oravan’s data or MCP server, and how to report an error.
To build on Oravan’s data, use the MCP server. It gives an AI agent the same plain-language bill summaries and representative lookups. It is read-only and keyless, and it cites its sources. MCP server docs →
Canonical URLs
Every bill gets one permanent address in each language, built only from its own bill type, number and Congress, never from its status. A citation written the day a bill is introduced still works after the bill is signed, fails or expires. The address is never reused or reassigned.
Example (H.R. 1787, the same bill used in Oravan’s demo material):
https://oravan.org/bills/hr-1787-119
"Data as of" freshness
Every page states the date of Oravan’s last successful nightly sync with Congress.gov. It is not a live feed, and it is not the date you loaded the page. Cite that date, not today’s date, as the moment the facts were last checked. It is the same value as the as_of field in every MCP tool response. One exception: the news articles in a bill’s "How it's being covered" section don’t come from Congress.gov. Coverage is re-checked on its own rotation (the most urgent bills every night, the rest in turn), so the stamp says nothing about how old those articles are. That section prints the date of the newest article it holds. Cite that as the coverage’s own cutoff, not as the date we last checked. Newer coverage may exist that we haven’t collected.
Data as of October 9, 2026
Where the data comes from
Bill status, dates, sponsor and text come from Congress.gov. Member and district-office data comes from the public-domain unitedstates/congress-legislators project. Both refresh only through Oravan’s own nightly sync. The MCP citation envelope states the source in the language the query asked for. Both language versions are shown below:
English: Congress.gov and unitedstates/congress-legislators, via Oravan's nightly sync
Español: Congress.gov y unitedstates/congress-legislators, mediante la sincronización nocturna de Oravan
The AI-content policy
Two kinds of text appear on a bill page, and they're never presented the same way. The official record — title, status, sponsor, dates, last action, the Congress.gov link — is copied, not generated. The plain-language layer — the headline, the summary, and the what/who/why/cost sections — is written by AI, and no field publishes unless automated gates pass: both languages present, the official record attached, and a schema check on every plain-language version — a version that comes back missing a required field is discarded rather than stored half-written, and the whole corpus is re-checked before the nightly sync is allowed to publish anything. The Spanish version of that layer is an AI translation of the English plain-language version, produced in the same model call rather than a second reading of the bill, and it clears the same checks: the Spanish is one of those required fields, so a plain-language version without it is never published in English alone. Nonpartisan wording is held two different ways, and we won't blur them: on bills' plain-language versions it's a drafting instruction to the model, and on Big Questions it's an enforced vocabulary check that blocks the publish. Wherever content written by AI appears — the site, the MCP server, an embed — it carries this label, in the language the request used; both language versions are shown below:
English: This plain-language content is AI-generated and automatically checked before publish. It is not the official bill text.
Español: Este contenido en lenguaje sencillo es generado por IA y verificado automáticamente antes de publicarse. No es el texto oficial del proyecto de ley.
Call scripts follow a stricter rule still: they're drafted only inside Oravan's own site, and a caller must read and can edit the script before placing a call. Oravan's MCP server never generates one. It returns a link to the on-site flow instead, so an agent can't bypass that human-review step.
Licensing
- Official-record data (U.S. public domain), in both languages:
English: Public domain (Congress.gov; unitedstates/congress-legislators).
Español: Dominio público (Congress.gov; unitedstates/congress-legislators).
- Oravan's own plain-language content written by AI, in both languages:
English: CC BY 4.0 (Oravan's AI-generated plain-language content); underlying official data is U.S. public domain (Congress.gov).
Español: CC BY 4.0 (el contenido en lenguaje sencillo generado por IA de Oravan); los datos oficiales subyacentes son de dominio público en EE. UU. (Congress.gov).
AllSides' outlet-lean ratings, shown in each bill's "Read" section, are used under a separate CC BY-NC license and are excluded from the MCP server and from anything commercial. They are a website-only feature until that's resolved.
Report an error
To report a mistranslation, a misread status or a plain-language summary that misstates what a bill does, email hello@oravan.org. Name the bill and describe the error.
Email hello@oravan.orgWhat happens when a correction is confirmed
A confirmed error is fixed at the source: the data that both languages’ plain-language versions are built from. From there, every surface that reads that data updates together on Oravan’s next deploy. The bill page, its statically generated share-card image and the MCP server’s tool responses all read the same file, so there is no separate cache to clear. The one thing that doesn’t move on its own is the freshness stamp. The site-wide "as of" date and the MCP envelope’s as_of field both track Oravan’s last successful nightly sync, so they advance at the next scheduled sync after the fix ships, as they do every night. The embeddable bill card reads the same file too, so it needs no correction step of its own.
A correction that points to a broader pattern, not a one-off slip, is tracked as a pattern instead of being patched quietly and forgotten.