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Karma And The History Book

You do something real — knock doors, file a sourced record, get a challenger to agree to run — and the movement records it, has another citizen confirm it, and keeps it. Karma is the recognition that work earns: a citizen's own score for their own logged work, kept in different words from an award the movement publishes about a public official.

An action is recorded as soon as a citizen logs it and scored only after another citizen verifies it; at month close a single pass turns the raw points into one monthly karma score, which feeds the public boards, the lifetime total, and an itemized statement, while work that did not count is still shown with its reason.

What it does​

An action is recorded the moment a citizen logs it, and scored later, once somebody else has confirmed it. The citizen sees "recorded" at once and "worth N karma" after verification. The gap between the two is left visible rather than hidden.

Every kind of action lives in a published catalog. Each entry carries raw points, a track — the lane of work it belongs to, such as Challengers, Communications, Organizing or Lawmaking — a verification tier running from automatic to peer to steward to admin, a monthly cap, and a flag for the few outcomes that changed something. A challenger filing to run is not the same size as a post, and the catalog says so in advance.

Raw points are noise on purpose: they land unevenly and reward whoever has the most peers nearby to report on them, which measures social density, not contribution. So at month close one pass sums raw points per track, damps repetition of the same action, normalizes each track against that month's active cohort, weights the tracks so the loudest lane is not the only one that counts, applies an integrity factor, and floors any month containing a decisive act. Out comes one monthly karma score, and monthly scores accumulate into a lifetime total.

The public boards are headed History Book of Citizens Fixing Democracy. Several time windows run side by side, because recent work and lifetime work are different stories: the last three months, the last two weeks, and lifetime. A 24-hour board is designed but not built: the server does not compute that window. A citizen outside the visible rows is told their true rank over the whole window rather than being faked into a position.

Every month is itemized in a statement the citizen can check: each verified act with its base points and what it was awarded; a plain-words line under every cap and multiplier, so no adjustment is silent; a section for the acts that did not count — pending, rejected, or disputed — each with its reason; the arithmetic track by track; the policy as it ran that month rather than today's; and a Dispute this item action on a single line.

The goal it serves​

Opinions are cheap. A doorknock, a sourced record, an hour of recorded testimony, a challenger who agreed to run — those are scarce, and nothing in our politics asked citizens for them or kept a receipt. This exists to make that scarce resource countable.

Credit here is something other people give you: the actions worth the most cannot be self-logged at all, and arrive as a report filed by somebody else. Every line traces back to a URL a stranger can open. That is what separates a record of work from a follower count.

It is also the lever. A captured incumbent is not removed by argument; the seat changes hands on the volume of unglamorous, checkable work done before a primary, and a movement that cannot see who is doing that work cannot ask the right person for the right thing. The action catalog is the menu, replacing captured incumbents is what the menu is for, and karma is the ledger connecting the two.

Underneath the daily boards sits the Leader History Book: a permanent, hash-chained record of the contributions that changed something and the citizens behind them. An entry is about a contribution, not a personality. Nobody arrives automatically — a steward nominates, an admin confirms — and an anchored entry cannot be quietly rewritten.

What keeps it honest​

  • No negative karma, no downvotes, no public shaming. The only downward force is rejecting a claim nobody can support, and a rejection records its reason instead of deleting the record.
  • The anti-gaming rules are stated, not implied. You cannot verify your own work. One URL backs one record. Work above a monthly cap is still kept in the history, worth zero and marked capped. Two citizens verifying each other repeatedly in one month are flagged for review rather than automatically penalized.
  • A sealed month is final. A later correction is appended beside the original as an amendment with its own anchored block, showing before and after. The original is never overwritten.
  • The board publishes nothing a citizen did not publish. The privacy contract is enforced on the server, not in the browser: the board renders the display name the citizen chose, and no photograph unless they turned one on. A fully pseudonymous citizen can hold the top of every board.
  • It says what it is not. Karma measures logged work for this movement and nothing else. It is not a measure of a person's worth, and it is never a finding about a politician.

Works with​

Where to go next​

  • Karma — the full citizen side of the ledger, and why score is the right word here.
  • The Leader History Book — how a contribution earns its way into the permanent record, and who has to sign off.
  • Communities — the shared workspace an action is filed into.
  • Trust Scores — whether a participant is a real, believable citizen at all, which karma never answers.
  • Take Action — the things you can do this week, each worth karma and logged with a link somebody else can check.
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