Proposals And Review
Almost everything this movement publishes it took from the official record. This is the other door: the form a citizen fills in to add something the record does not carry, or to say a record already there is wrong. Behind it is the console where a submission is read in full before anything is published.
What it does
Six kinds of submission share one form, one inbox and one queue. A problem the movement has not listed. The enacted law causing one it has listed. A good law that would have repaired something, together with who stopped it. A fix bill — legislative language somebody could file. A person who belongs on one of the rosters. And feedback, saying an existing record is wrong or missing a source. Feedback shares that queue on purpose: a staffer correcting a voting record and a citizen naming a new problem are the same event to whoever reads it, and two inboxes is how one of them starts being ignored.
Every submission requires a written rationale: a proposal with no argument in it is not a proposal, and the form will not send it.
The door then does the harder work. A claim about a named living person, an enacted law, or a blocker is refused outright at submission without a source URL. The strictest case is "who stopped it": asserting that somebody used a position of power to prevent a vote requires the official record, the office held, and one factual sentence about what they did. "The bill died in that committee and they were the chair" is refused as an inference, with that as the stated reason.
Most kinds are then promoted in the same request that files them. The waiting was removed; the machinery was not. Filing runs the identical path an approval runs — the same key minting and freezing, the same duplicate guards, the same audit row — and the record says plainly it was approved automatically, never naming a person who did not read it. One kind still waits for a human: putting a named person onto a movement roster in a public repository. Every other kind describes a thing; that one describes somebody.
The review console opens the whole submission with nothing truncated — every source a clickable link, videos playable in place — above a standing checklist and the decision buttons. Approve is hard-disabled where a required piece is missing, the reason printed on the button. Decline requires a reason, and the author is shown it word for word. Nothing is hard-deleted: a declined submission stays readable by its author, and part of the record of what the movement was asked and chose not to do.
On a citizen's own machine the person holding all of this is the one at the keyboard. Whoever is physically on the box owns the box, and the console is theirs.
The goal it serves
A movement that silently drops citizen contributions stops receiving them. That is a truth-gathering problem, not a courtesy one. Someone who knows a law is doing damage in their county will send it once. If nothing they can see happens next, they do not send it twice, and the record stays as thin as whoever staffs it.
The rule runs the other way. A movement that refuses information because of who sent it is not seeking truth. A politician correcting the record of their own votes is exactly the correction we want, so a submission about its own author is labelled, permanently and visibly, and never blocked. We do not refuse information based on where it came from; we refuse to hide where it came from. Open Data makes that same commitment about the whole record, and proposing a correction is this loop pointed at something already published.
The other half of this is aimed at us, not at Washington. Everything published here about a person is arithmetic over the official record that anyone can redo. That survives only if nothing negative about a named living person reaches the record because somebody skimmed one clamped line and clicked through. The problem records and problem laws most submissions become are citable only because the console makes that failure hard to reach.
What keeps it honest
- The gate is at the door, not at the decision. No rationale, no submission. No citation on a claim about a person or an enacted law, no submission. Removing the wait did not move that bar.
- Approve refuses out loud. Zero sources on a kind that requires them, a submission the app cannot read, a proposal already decided — each disables the button and prints the reason on it.
- No bulk approve exists, at any count. A hundred good-faith submissions waiting is a good problem. A hundred unread approvals about named living people is an incident.
- Deletion is narrow and leaves a tombstone. A submission carrying a private person's home address, or an unsourced accusation, can be destroyed — with a required reason and an audit row naming the id, the author, the date, and a hash of what was removed. The content goes; the accountability does not.
- What is not built, plainly. In community mode a proposal should be able to gather co-signers before review. That does not exist yet.
Works with
- The Official Record Or Nothing — the sourcing rule this form enforces at the door, before anything is filed.
- The Rosters — the one destination that still waits for a human to read the submission first.
- Decisions, Areas And Communities — the areas and decisions a community works through are where a gap in the record is noticed first.
- The First-Principles AI Check — it tests whether a chain of reasoning holds, which is what a rationale is for. It never decides.
- Value Systems And Policy Packets — a written value system is the yardstick a citizen argues from when explaining why a record is wrong.
Where to go next
- Take Action — the catalog of things a citizen can do this week. Filing one of these is on it.
- What is a problem record — what a problem must contain to be worth submitting.
- Recommend a leader — the one kind that still waits for a human.
- Repos — the code and the data behind all of this, open to check.
- Open the app — file the first one.