Manifest

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Why we are building HQ

The modern information landscape is a chaotic mess that is hard to navigate. It has become hard, almost impossible, to stay up-to-date with what is happening around the world, your bubble or inside your organisation. Many are lost and unable to make sense of the information they are presented with. Understandably so, as the amount of information is growing exponentially and the quality of the information is decreasing. So how can you make sense of and present the information in a way that is easy to understand and use? This is not a problem of knowledge. It’s a problem of not having the right tools.

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The Idea

A journalist knows how to identify “security framing” in news coverage.
A policy analyst knows what counts as “meaningful stakeholder engagement.”
An accountant knows which line on a scanned invoice is the total.
A legal assistant knows which clause in a contract actually matters. Any document you work with - you know what to look for. You have your own “lens” on things. Our goal is to enable you in applying your lens on your data.

(Methodically, reproducible, and at scale)

You inherited 10 years of internal documents - nobody knows what’s in there.
Your inbox has 3,000 unread emails from a project that ended badly.
You have a folder called “misc” with 400 PDFs. You’d know it if you saw it. You’ve done this before, manually, on a handful of documents. That recognition - you’ve done it. On ten documents. Maybe fifty. But not five hundred. Not five thousand. At some point you stop. Not because you don’t know what you’re looking for. Because doing it again, and again, and again - that’s not a knowledge problem. It’s a labor problem. And until now, solving it meant hiring engineers or learning to code yourself. HQ lets you write down what you’re looking for - in plain language - and apply it across everything. Your questions, your methods and results. Your question becomes a schema. The schema becomes a method. The outputs structured and reproducible. The method runs at scale. And because schemas are just text, they’re shareable, transparent, improvable. Others can see exactly how you defined your framework - critique it, refine it, or apply it to their own data. For example: analysing 1,000 speeches from the European Parliament

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A note about software as public infrastructure

This capability of analysing large amounts of data that is generalizable and works at scale should not be locked behind wealthy private companies or institutional walls. Yet it mostly is. Schemas, geocoding, vector search, local AI - basic components when you list them out. But that’s the point. These are intelligence capabilities an open society needs. Like libraries or archives, they should be equally accessible. Open source. Self-hostable. Or bring your own LLM keys and use our hosted variant. Share your analytical frameworks publicly if you want transparency. Use it for journalism, research, advocacy, governance - anything that serves the public interest. None of this would exist without the many people dedicated to open source and the countless open technologies we build upon. We are standing on the shoulders of giants and a massive collaborative ecosystem. We are grateful for their work and proud to take part of it.

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Project Origins & Funding

Talk: Open Source Political Intelligence

CCCB Datengarten Presentation

We started this at Freie Universität Berlin’s Political Science department, working on a research paper. At some point we looked at what we’d built and thought - this is useful beyond just our project. And the capability to do this kind of work exists, but it’s locked behind expensive platforms or requires engineering teams - and always written in proprietary code. So we felt to urge to build HQ, start the Open Politics Project and make this available for everyone. Our first official funding came from the European Horizon NGI Search project. Before that, we were lucky to have a warm circle of friends and early supporters who believed in the idea before there was much to show. No venture capital - just journalists and neighbours who got it. The business model is simple: we’ll keep a free hosted version running with as much free storage space as we can shoulder. Hosting HQ is cheap - most of the cost comes from LLMs which on the hosted variant you bring yourself via API keys. We focus on helping organisations deploy and use the platform effectively: infrastructure orchestration, custom implementations, training. The platform itself always stays open source and self-hostable. No tracking or telemetry. Our marketing is the research that gets done with these tools. If people publish interesting work using HQ, that’s worth more than any advertising campaign.

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Contact & Contributing

We’re building this in the open. Code, analytical methods, documentation - all public and improvable.

Code Repository

Report bugs, suggest features, contribute or have a look inside.

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License

AGPLv3 - Use, modify, distribute freely. Services built on it must also be open source. Enterprise licenses available for private modifications under strict ethical guidelines. Find the full license here.