Terms of Use

Last updated: November 12, 2026

Publius Engine is a service of Sentinel Engine LLC, a Texas limited liability company ("we", "us"). These terms apply to everyone who uses Publius Engine: the workspace, the meeting map, alert emails and briefs, alert pages, and this website. By signing in or using the service, you agree to them.

Most people use Publius Engine because an organization (for example, an advocacy group or a policy institute) has an agreement with us and has given them access. If your organization's written agreement with us says something different from these terms, the agreement controls for that organization.

1. Who can use Publius Engine

You must be at least 18 years old.
Access to the workspace and alerts is given by an organization. Your organization decides who has access, what area each person sees, and what they can change. It can change or end your access at any time.
You may use the service only on behalf of the organization that gave you access, and only for its purposes.

2. Signing in and keeping your access safe

You sign in with your email address. We send a link and a one-time code; there is no password. Some roles also use an authenticator app.
Keep your email account secure. Anyone who controls it can sign in as you.
Do not share your sign-in links, codes, or personal map link. A button in a forwarded email does not sign anyone in by itself, but a personal map link opens your map for whoever has it.
Tell your organization's admin, or us, right away if you think someone else has used your access.

3. What the service does, and what it does not

Publius Engine reads agendas, packets, minutes, and other records that public bodies post online, and uses software, including artificial intelligence, to summarize them and flag items your organization has asked us to watch.

Because of how this works:

Summaries can be wrong or incomplete. Automated analysis can misread a document, miss an item, or describe it inaccurately. Always check the original document, which we link wherever we can, before you rely on a summary or act on it.
Records change. Public bodies add, remove, and amend agenda items and reschedule meetings, sometimes after we have read them.
Coverage is not complete. We cannot guarantee that we read every public body, every meeting, or every document, or that we read them by a particular time.
It is not advice. Nothing in Publius Engine is legal, political, financial, or other professional advice. Decisions about what to do with the information are yours and your organization's.

4. How you may not use it

You agree not to:

use the service to threaten, harass, or intimidate anyone, including public officials, or to encourage anyone else to do so;
publish personal information about anyone that was not already made public by them or by a public body;
present alerts or briefs as official communications of a public body;
try to reach information, people, or settings outside the access your organization gave you;
copy, scrape, or download the service or its data in bulk, or resell or redistribute it, unless your organization's agreement allows it;
interfere with, probe, or overload the service, or work around its security; or
break any law, or infringe anyone's rights, while using it.

5. Your content

"Your content" means what you or your organization put into Publius Engine: names and contact details of people you add, branding and logos, wording and images for alert pages, notes and links you send us, and similar material.

You and your organization keep ownership of your content.
You give us permission to store, process, display, and send your content as needed to provide and improve the service for your organization.
You are responsible for your content, including having the right to use it and a lawful basis to give us the names and email addresses of the people you add.
Alert pages and share images are public to anyone with the link. Do not put anything on them that you would not want seen outside your organization.

6. Our content

The service, its software and design, and the alerts, briefs, maps, and analyses it produces belong to us or our licensors, except for your content and for the public records themselves. While your organization has access, you may use alerts and briefs for your organization's work, including sharing alert pages as the service allows. Public records remain public.

If you send us ideas or suggestions, we may use them without owing you anything.

7. Fees

Fees, if any, are set in your organization's agreement with us. Individual users are not charged.

8. Suspending or ending access

We may suspend or end access for anyone who breaks these terms, puts the service or other people at risk, or when an organization's agreement ends. Your organization may end your access at any time. Sections 5 to 13 continue to apply after access ends.

9. Disclaimers

To the fullest extent the law allows, the service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, timeliness, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not promise that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free.

10. Limits on our liability

To the fullest extent the law allows:

we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, data, or goodwill, arising from or related to the service; and
our total liability for any claim related to the service is limited to the greater of the fees your organization paid us for the service in the 12 months before the claim arose, or US $100.

Some places do not allow these limits, so they may not all apply to you.

11. Responsibility for misuse

If you or your organization misuse the service or your content infringes someone's rights, you agree to cover the reasonable costs, including legal fees, that we incur because of it.

12. Law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute will be heard in the state or federal courts located in Dallas County, Texas, and you and we consent to those courts.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. When we do, we change the date at the top. If a change is significant, we will tell organizations' admins before it takes effect. Using the service after a change means you accept the updated terms.

14. Contact

Questions about these terms: brian@publiusengine.com.