The Public Data Repository
Everything this movement says about a law, a vote or a politician is kept in a separate public repository, not in a database behind a login. You can copy the whole thing to your own computer, read every file, and see who approved each one and when. A claim you cannot check for yourself is a claim you are being asked to take on faith.
What it does
The public data repository holds the movement's evidence base as ordinary files: the problem list, the enacted laws blamed for each problem, the roll-call votes as plain spreadsheets, the laws that would repair democracy and who kept them from a vote, the two rosters of people, the qualification catalog challengers are assessed against, the plan and the seat records. It sits beside the app rather than inside it, and while the app runs it is read-only.
The commit is the approval. There is no separate approvals database. When an admin approves something, that approval exists as a change to a file, carrying the reason and the approving admin's name in the message. Nothing was approved that is not visible there, and nothing visible there was approved by someone who is not named. A wrong call is undone by a further change published as publicly as the error was, and the wrong file stays readable and marked rather than deleted.
The code and the data live in separate repositories on purpose, because a commit means a different thing in each. A bad commit in the code is a bug. A bad commit in the data is a false public statement about a named living person. So a change touching a person's file requires a second admin before it is published, while everything else takes one.
Continuous checks run on every push, and four of them are hard blocks that stop the change entirely:
- Any claim about a named living person with no source link to the official record.
- An added image with no entry in the content-address ledger.
- Anything matching a credential pattern — a key, a token, a private key file.
- A real email address or street address, anywhere outside the clearly fictional sample files.
The rule runs just as strictly in the other direction: the repository publishes what the movement asserts, never who inside the movement asserted it. Which citizen recommended a person, proposed a fix, cast a vote or flagged something never enters it, and neither does anyone's own reasoning, positions or values. The one published identity is the approving admin's, because accountability runs toward the people with power, not the people asking them to use it.
Every published image is also pinned by content address, with its hash written into the same commit. Anyone can check a photograph against that hash, and it stays reachable if our hosting disappears, because a content address is not a hostname.
The goal it serves
The whole argument of this site is that citizens should check the record themselves instead of taking Washington's word for it. That argument does not survive a movement that then asks you to take its own word. If the evidence behind a published finding lived only where our admins could read it, every claim on the site would rest on trusting us.
Publishing the whole evidence base removes permission from the equation. A journalist, a political opponent, or a representative's own staff can clone it, follow a claim to its source on the official record, and come back with a correction — without an account, and without us being able to quietly change what was there yesterday. That is what Open Data and Evidence rest on, and what lets Politicians publish arithmetic over the public record instead of opinions about people.
The other half of the goal is restraint. A public history showing which citizen recommended which politician would turn a transparency device into a surveillance device, and would be read that way by anyone thinking of contributing. Transparency here is aimed at power, not at the people trying to hold it to account.
What keeps it honest
The repository publishes what it does not have. A generated gap ledger sits at its root listing every hole the movement knows about in its own record — which chambers and years are missing, and what each gap blocks on screen. It is committed and public, because a named gap beats a quiet one.
The pinning is a stated gap, not a finished system. Images carry a content address, but the ledger records which services actually hold a copy, and today that is a small number of machines rather than an always-up service.
The repository does not claim to be proof. A file in it is what the movement asserts, backed by a link to the official record that produced it — the House Clerk, the Senate, a state's own site. If you follow one and the file is wrong, the fix appears in the same public history as the mistake.
Works with
- Run It On Your Own Computer — the repository is cloned beside the app, so the evidence is local to you.
- Official Record Sourcing — the rule the source-link check enforces on every push.
- Coverage And Named Gaps — the gap ledger committed at the repository root.
- The Citizen Mining Network — content-addressed media is what volunteers replicate, so the evidence outlives our hosting.
- Nothing Fails Quietly — the same discipline in the software: a malformed file is reported, not silently absorbed.
Where to go next
- Open Data — what is in the public record, and how to check a claim end to end.
- The sourcing rule — why the official record or nothing.
- Naming the gaps — how missing evidence is published rather than papered over.
- Run your own instance — stand up code and data yourself, and check it without our help.
- Propose a correction — how to send a fix back when a record is wrong.