Rules that affect everyone should be visible to everyone.

The Federal Register is great. Good API, structured data. But it covers about 10% of what actually changes.

The other 90% happens on agency websites. An FDA guidance page gets quietly revised. A state insurance commissioner publishes a bulletin as a PDF. The SEC updates staff guidance without a press release. OSHA changes an FAQ answer. A state AG issues an enforcement priority memo.

No API. No RSS. No notification. Just a webpage that looks different today than it did yesterday.

This isn't a technology problem. It's a transparency problem. When government action is invisible, accountability breaks down. Businesses get blindsided by rules they didn't know changed. Journalists miss stories happening in plain sight. Advocacy groups find out about policy shifts weeks after the fact. Citizens affected by rule changes are the last to know.

And regulation is increasingly global. An EU directive triggers compliance changes in New York. An FDA ruling reshapes clinical trials in Singapore. A UK sanctions update affects banks in Toronto. The organizations that need to track this can barely keep up with their own country's agencies, let alone dozens of others.

The result is a system where only the well-funded have awareness, and only the well-funded steer regulation. Not through conspiracy. Through the simple mechanics of who knew early enough to show up. Regulations go through proposals, comment periods, and feedback rounds. But you can only participate if you know the process is happening. When only corporations are in the room, the rules get written for corporations.

GovPing monitors 3,380 government and regulatory sources. Federal agencies, state regulators, courts, industry bodies. When something changes, AI reads the page, classifies it (instrument type, jurisdiction, effective date, who it affects, what action is required), and publishes it. Structured. Searchable. Free.

Every change is annotated in ORCA format (Open Regulatory Change Annotation). The same structured fields whether the source is a Federal Register final rule with a clean API or a state insurance department PDF on a legacy .gov site.

One format for everything. The formal publications and the quiet agency updates, treated identically.

This data is produced by government agencies, funded by taxpayers. You paid for it. You have a right to it. But until now, getting it in a usable format cost $10,000 to $50,000 a year. Large corporations knew when rules changed. Everyone else checked agency websites by hand, if they checked at all.

AI and modern infrastructure collapsed the cost of monitoring and enriching this data by 95%. We're passing that on. Not as a free trial. Not as a limited demo. The full index, every change, every annotation, every day.

A compliance team at a bank uses GovPing because it's their job. A journalist uses it to find the story nobody else sees. An advocacy group uses it to hold regulators accountable. A law student uses it to understand how agencies actually work. Same data. Same quality. Zero cost.

Healthcare has FHIR. Cybersecurity has STIX/TAXII. Financial reporting has XBRL. Regulatory compliance has nothing. Every GRC platform uses its own proprietary schema. Every content provider builds bespoke connectors.

ORCA (Open Regulatory Change Annotation) fixes that. It extends the Federal Register API schema to cover all regulatory sources. Same field names where they overlap. Extended with AI-enriched fields where they don't.

The spec is at govping.org/orca