Responsive Policy Project (RPP) lifts the curtain on public policy, making it easy to find, understand, and engage with opaque policy documents. Ultimately, RPP aims to radically transform policy by changing who participates and how.

Responsive Policy Project (RPP) lifts the curtain on public policy, making it easy to find, understand, and engage with opaque policy documents. Ultimately, RPP aims to radically transform public policy by changing who participates and how.

Public Policy Public policy not only expresses our values as a society and dictates how we spend taxpayer dollars, but it also shapes our everyday existence – from who can vote to how we pay parking tickets. But at a foundational level, public policy is expressed through dense legal documents – namely legislation (laws), regulation (rules), executive orders, and guidance documents – enacted at the federal, state, and local levels.

Why How we access information – and what information we can access – has been completely revolutionized. Yet, public policy remains inaccessible; it is hard to 1) find, 2) read, 3) understand, and 4) change. This is intentional. Such opacity ensures that public policy remains in the hands of politicians, lobbyists, and lawyers – those with power and privilege. On the flip side, making public policy easy to navigate and understand opens up the possibility for people-centered policymaking.

Interest in public policy is at an all-time high – from urgent challenges, such as COVID-19 and extreme weather, to bold reforms, such as universal healthcare and police abolition. But there is no go- to website that allows users to explore policy – its history, evolution, and application – and interact with policy as-written, rather than as-spun by politicians and secondary sources.

How RPP is building a user-friendly, authoritative, and dynamic platform for public policy. We begin by making it easy to navigate different policy areas through nested, intuitive wiki-style explainers. We reframe policy based on how it is experienced in everyday life, rather than how it appears on the books. Then, we link users to the policy documents themselves. We provide different layers of annotation – e.g. plain language (what does this mean), studies and analysis, advocate and lobbyist perspectives, user experiences, and comparisons across different states – to bring these documents to life. We aim to shine a light on public policy as it is, but also open up a space to imagine how it could be different.

Responsive Public policy can feel inefficient, at best, and out of touch to the point of irrelevancy, at worst. RPP creates feedback loops to design stronger systems that reflect real-time needs. In addition, RPP provides a space to call out otherwise unaccountable actors, both public and private, as even the most well-crafted policies often fall short in their implementation.