Politrack 🇦🇹

What Austrian politicians do, with every claim linked to its sources.

Politrack collects publicly available information about Austrian politicians and parties, from the EU and federal level down to municipalities: mandates and functions, how factions and individuals voted, party donations and finances, public contracts, government advertising, side jobs, lobby meetings, speeches, questions and public posts, media reports, trips and meetings, and legal proceedings. Every fact is a claim with one or more pieces of evidence (links), so readers can verify it and decide which sources they trust.

• 🇩🇪 German UI by default (/), English at /en
• Users choose which sources they trust and which topics they care about
• Pages per person, party and organisation, a money explorer, calendar and timeline
• Votes: faction votes for every bill, individual roll-call votes with a dissent flag, and "say vs. vote" (did the person speak on the item?)
• Follow the money: donations, party funding, loans and holdings, public contracts, government ads, political ads – and the organisations a politician is connected to
• Corroboration: the same fact from independent sources becomes one claim with several sources
• Former politicians: what they are doing now
• Legal matters always carry the procedural stage and "Es gilt die Unschuldsvermutung"; automatically detected ones need human review first
• Agent-ready: MCP server, typed REST/OpenAPI, read-only SQL role, pgvector chunks for RAG
• Runs as Docker containers on a homelab (Unraid); workers scale horizontally
• Legal by construction: robots.txt, rate limits, TDM reservations and storage rules are enforced in the framework, not left to each scraper

Documentation

Doc	Contents
docs/architecture/01-design-from-scratch.md	The architecture: quality goals, data model, adapter framework, serving, testing, guard-rails
docs/architecture/02-comparison-and-decisions.md	Why it is built this way (decision records)
docs/data-model.md	Tables, claim types, identifier schemes, views
docs/sources.md	Every source with access method, licence/ToS assessment, and what we deliberately don't collect (incl. Telegram/WhatsApp/Signal)
docs/legal.md	Copyright/TDM, GDPR, MedienG §7b (presumption of innocence), defamation
docs/deployment-unraid.md	Step-by-step Unraid setup, backups, exposure
docs/investigative-data.md	Data points for investigative work and the correlations they enable
docs/market-research.md	Existing services and the gaps Politrack fills
docs/roadmap.md	What's done and what comes next
CONTRIBUTING.md	How to contribute: adapters, enrichers, API, frontend, tests

Quick start

cp .env.example .env          # set passwords and a real contact address for the crawler
docker compose up -d --build  # db, migrate, api, web, mcp, workers
docker compose exec api politrack sources list                 # all adapters/enrichers and their schedules
docker compose exec api politrack run parlament.persons        # members, mandates, side jobs, speeches
docker compose exec api politrack run wikidata.politicians     # state/local offices, parties, careers, social handles
docker compose exec api politrack run parlament.items          # votes, roll calls, immunity, questions, hearings
docker compose exec api politrack run rechnungshof.donations   # party donations
docker compose exec api politrack enrich                       # linking, events, legal detection, corroboration
docker compose exec api politrack review                       # approve/reject automatically detected legal matters
docker compose exec api politrack status                       # recent runs with stats and errors

The workers then keep everything fresh on their own: each adapter declares its cron schedule and queue.

• Web: http://localhost:3000
• API docs: http://localhost:8000/api/docs
• MCP (streamable HTTP): http://localhost:8001/mcp
• SQL (read-only): postgresql://politrack_reader:<POLITRACK_READER_PASSWORD>@localhost:5433/politrack

Repository layout

backend/                     Python package `politrack` (one image for API, workers, MCP)
  migrations/                SQL schema (commented for agents) + seed (chambers, parties, topics)
  config/                    feeds.yaml, social_accounts.yaml, ip_ranges.yaml, meta_pages.yaml
  politrack/
    core/                    the framework: SourceSpec, Adapter/Enricher, Request/Response, Fetcher
                             (policy + archive), records, Resolver, Loader, registry, runner
    sources/                 one module per publisher (parlament/, wikidata, rechnungshof, bundesregierung,
                             procurement, rtr, eu, wikipedia, political_ads, justiz, news, gdelt, social)
    enrich/                  linker, events, legal, topics, maintenance, corroborate, embed, curated
    queries/                 read queries shared by API and MCP
    api/                     FastAPI app + Pydantic response models
    mcp_server.py            MCP tools for agents
    worker.py                Procrastinate tasks generated from the registry
  tests/                     unit tests + golden fixtures
web/                         Next.js 15 + next-intl frontend (types generated from the API)
docs/
docker-compose.yml

Contributing

Adding a source is one module with a SourceSpec, start() and a pure parse() – see docs/contributing/adapters.md and CONTRIBUTING.md.

Data licence & attribution

Data from the Austrian Parliament: © Parlamentsdirektion, CC BY 4.0. Wikidata: CC0. Rechnungshof, Bundeskanzleramt and WKStA publications are official works (§7 UrhG). Open government data from data.gv.at and RTR under their respective licences (mostly CC BY 4.0). Media content is linked, not reproduced.