OpenTN is Live: Campaign Finance Data for Every Tennessean
Today we’re launching OpenTN, and it’s one of the projects I’m most proud of shipping from Position5.
OpenTN is a free, non-partisan platform that takes Tennessee campaign finance filings and makes them actually usable. You can search candidates, look up your reps by ZIP code, trace where the money comes from, and get a real picture of how campaigns are funded in this state.
Why we built this
Campaign finance data in Tennessee is technically public. But “technically public” and “actually accessible” are two very different things. Try navigating raw filing data from the Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance sometime — it’s not exactly a Friday night activity.
We figured: we know how to build data platforms, we know how to make information findable, and we live in Tennessee. So we built the tool we wished existed.
What’s in there right now
As of launch day, OpenTN is tracking:
- 233 candidates at the state and local level
- 22,485 unique donors
- $15.9 million in total contributions
- 43,525 individual contribution records
All of it sourced directly from official state filings. No editorializing, no spin, just the data.
The Community Funding Index
One of the features I’m most excited about is what we’re calling the Community Funding Index. It’s a scoring system that looks at how a candidate is funded across four dimensions: small-dollar support, in-district donations, how spread out their funding base is, and the ratio of individual donors to PAC money.
It’s not a political rating. It doesn’t tell you who to vote for. It gives you a factual lens into how a candidate’s campaign is financed, and lets you decide what that means to you.
A new direction for Position5
Up until now, Position5 has been building developer tools and data infrastructure: licensing engines, WordPress plugins, trading data pipelines. OpenTN is our first step into civic technology, and it won’t be the last.
The same engineering muscle we put into commercial software can — and should — go toward problems that actually matter to people. Government transparency is one of those. The data already exists. Someone just has to make it usable. That’s what we did.
Check it out
Head over to opentn.org and look up your ZIP code. See who represents you and where their campaign money comes from. Share it with someone who cares about local politics. That’s the whole point — putting this information in people’s hands.
If you have feedback, ideas, or want to help us expand coverage, reach out at cr.carlosandres@gmail.com.
Here’s to building things that matter.