POLITICZ
Public notice
for private persons

Politics is not
what you watch.
It is the things of
the people who live here.

That is not a slogan. It is the word's definition. Ta politiká — the things of the citizens. This page gives you the three facts almost no American can state about their own government, and then asks you for them.

I The word

Four words have been quietly redefined underneath us. Put each one back on its root and the argument for staying out of politics stops making sense.

IDIŌTĒS
ἰδιώτης · ancient greek

A private person. In classical Athens, the ordinary word for someone who held no office and took no part in the common business — as opposed to a politēs (πολίτης), a citizen who did. It carried no charge of stupidity. That came later, through Latin idiota, "layman, unlearned person," and only then into English as an insult.

The Greeks had a plain word for a person who left the common things to other people. We still use it. We just forgot it was a description of a choice.

POLIS · POLITĒS
πόλις · πολίτης · ancient greek

Politics comes from ta politiká — "the things of the citizens," from polis, the place you live. Not campaigns. Not parties. Not the noise. The things of the people who live here.

"I'm not political" parses as: I am not one of the people who live here.

POSSE
latin · to be able

Power is posse — to be able. Not domination; capacity. Every argument that power is dirty ends in the same place: the people who believe it hand their capacity to the people who don't.

You are not against power. You are without it.

TO WIN · TO LOVE
the test that fits in one line

Take winning to mean gaining choices, and losing to mean losing them. Then take Forrest Landry's definition — love is that which enables choice — and the two collapse into one measurable question you can put to any bill, budget, hire, or vote:

Whose choices did this open, and whose did it close?

If everyone applied that one test to every act of power they could see, the end state is a country where no decision survives without an answer to it.
the only claim this site makes
II The right you probably do not have

All 51 open-meetings laws give you the right to watch your government meet.

Thirteen guarantee you the right to speak. In the other thirty-eight, whether you may address your own city council is left to the council. Click any state for the statute.

Statute guarantees public comment 13
Partial / body's discretion 5
No statutory right to speak 33

Scope: each state's open-meetings law as it applies to a local governing body — city council, county board, school board. It is separate from your right to attend, which all 51 grant subject to the usual closed-session exceptions. Nothing here is legal advice; the citation is there so you can read the statute yourself.

Select a state on the map — or use the lookup below and it fills itself in.

All 51 jurisdictions as a table
JurisdictionOpen meetings lawCitationNoticeRight to speak
III The room

Power over your street is exercised in a room, on a weeknight, by about seven people.

Most Americans cannot name the room. Type an address and this tells you which body meets, where its calendar lives, what notice the law owes you, and who currently holds the seats above you. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere but the two public APIs named at the bottom of this page.

Jurisdiction lookup
US Census Geocoder · 5 Calls
or choose it yourself

IV The idiot test

Six questions. The answers are computed from your own address.

This is not an insult and it is not a quiz about the news. Idiōtēs was a job description, and the test is whether you currently hold it. Every answer below is checked against live public records for your jurisdiction — so you cannot argue with the score, only change it.

Run the lookup above first — the test builds itself from your jurisdiction.

V The practice

One act, dated, with a condition that can fail.

A conviction that cannot be falsified is a mood. Write down one thing you will do in the room you just found, the date you will do it by, and what would have to be true for it to have worked. Then apply the only test on this page: whose choices does it open?

01
Read the agenda before the meeting.The law requires it to be posted in advance precisely so that this is possible. Most agendas are read by nobody outside the building.
02
Go once, and say nothing.You cannot act in a room whose procedure you have never watched. One meeting removes more confusion than a year of reading.
03
Take one item and find out who decided it.Not the institution — the person, the vote, the date. Power that cannot be named cannot be moved.
04
Say one specific thing, on the record.Where your state grants no right to speak, that itself is the first item: ask the body to adopt a public-comment rule. Five states have added one by statute since 2019.
05
Bring exactly one other person.Not a movement. One. Doubling attendance at a body that seats seven is a measurable change in who is in the room.
Your commitment

What this page refuses to do

  • No feed, no likes, no follower count, no streak.
  • No petition and no pledge signature. A signature is not an act.
  • No party, no candidate, no endorsement, no donation button.
  • No account. Your address is used to make two public API calls and is never stored or transmitted anywhere else. Your commitment stays in your own browser.
  • No invented numbers. Every figure on this page comes from a source named below, and where the record is incomplete it says so instead of filling the gap.
Sources & method

Everything above is checkable. If any of it is wrong, the citation is here to prove it with.

Open-meetings law, 50 states + DCStatute name, citation, regular-meeting notice period and public-comment right, compiled from each state's own code and the Reporters Committee Open Government Guide, then corrected against statute text where the two disagreed. Notice periods are for regular meetings of local bodies; 19 jurisdictions set an open standard ("reasonable notice") rather than a number, and are recorded as such rather than guessed. rcfp.org/open-government-guide
Municipal meeting calendars, 125 largest US cities + 10 countiesEach calendar URL was fetched and content-checked, not merely pinged — a Legistar subdomain returns HTTP 200 for any name, so status-only checks produce false positives. Platform breakdown: 60 Legistar, 40 official city sites, 9 PrimeGov, 16 other. webapi.legistar.com
Address → jurisdictionUS Census Bureau Geocoder, Public_AR_Current benchmark. Returns state, county, incorporated place, congressional district and both state legislative districts. Federal, no key, authoritative. geocoding.geo.census.gov
Who holds your seats5 Calls (501(c)(4), non-profit) representative lookup — US House, both Senate seats, governor, attorney general, secretary of state and both state legislative chambers, with office phone numbers. 5calls.org
Map geometryUS Census TIGER state boundaries via us-atlas, Albers USA projection, simplified to 0.7px in screen space. github.com/topojson/us-atlas
Etymologyidiōtēs: Liddell–Scott–Jones, "private person, individual, one in a private station"; the pejorative sense enters English through Latin idiota. ta politiká, polis, politēs: standard. "Love is that which enables choice" is Forrest Landry's formulation. The omni-win-win frame descends from Buckminster Fuller's "a world that works for 100% of humanity."