The website https://opendiscourse.de/ is our contribution to democratizing access to political debates and issues.

We provide a database of every spoken word in the German Bundestag since its founding in 1949. The protocols of the German Bundestag are usually provided in PDF, TXT and for newer election periods also in XML format. We processed more than 300.000 pages of text to fill our database and also provide a full text search engine on https://opendiscourse.de/.

Open Discourse is a non-profit project of the employees of Limebit GmbH. The idea emerged from the skills and motivations of the employees, in break conversations and from the common ideas of democracy.

We are using sponsorship funds to:

• Keep our servers running that provide full text search and topic modeling
• Refresh the database with new protocols
• Develop new features such as improved searchability and models such as topic modeling

The Open Discourse database is the foundation for many PhD, Masters and Bachelors thesis in political sciences.

We hope that through our preliminary work, data-based journalism, science and civil society will benefit and that the facilitated access to data will encourage to analyze the political history of the Bundestag based on the language used by politicians.