Publishing To The Social Network
When you have worked a question all the way through, what you are holding is more than an opinion. It is a position, the evidence you leaned on, the pieces you could not get and why, and the conclusion that follows. Publishing sends that whole object to WeCitizens Social, the movement's paired social network at WeCitizens.social, instead of only the last line of it. You take that step on purpose, at the end. The app never takes it for you.
What it does
The record starts on your own machine. In Individual Mode a decision is two readable files side by side: structured YAML that software can parse, and a Markdown companion regenerated from it so the two can never disagree. It carries the question, your position and your confidence in it, the chain of evidence, the AI's re-check of whether the conclusion follows from first principles, and the fix you cast at the end.
Casting a fix and publishing it are two acts inside one control. Casting writes to your own disk. Publishing is the part that leaves the machine, and what travels is the object you authored, not a summary of it:
- The position — where you actually landed on the question, and how sure you are.
- The chain of evidence — every link you hold, each one carrying its own source.
- The named gaps — every link you do not hold, tagged with why: classified, suppressed, blocked, or unknown.
- Your threshold — the confidence level you said in advance you would act at.
- The conclusion, and the AI's first-principles re-check of it.
The post format is YAML, so another citizen's software can parse and evaluate the reasoning rather than only react to it. A value system publishes the same way, as a policy packet somebody else can import.
If your reasoning pointed at a file on your own computer, that path means nothing to anyone else, so the app never sends it. The contents are snapshotted into the published artifact instead, stamped with where they came from, when they last changed, and a hash. Until then the link is marked local-only, so a reader is never quietly missing half your case.
On the receiving side, a citizen weights incoming posts by how much they trust the author. That trust graph lets many individuals' reasoning compose into a shared conclusion with no central authority deciding what is true.
Publishing is also where the anonymous default user stops being enough. Reading, reasoning, recording a position and running the AI check all work with nobody signed in and nothing sent anywhere. An unattributable publication is the one thing review cannot repair afterwards, so that single checkbox asks for an account. A pseudonym is enough: a citizen who never publishes a legal name can still climb to the top of the trust ladder.
The goal it serves
Arguing online does not change minds, and the reason is structural rather than a failure of manners. The unit people exchange in a feed is a conclusion with the reasoning stripped off. Two verdicts collide, neither can be inspected, and the exchange has nowhere to go except louder. Why arguing online fails sets out that pattern.
Publishing the chain instead of the verdict gives disagreement somewhere to land. If your third link rests on a committee record and your fourth on a newspaper write-up, a reader can attack the fourth specifically, and that argument can actually be settled. Evidence covers how a chain is built to be audited that way.
The named gaps carry the most weight. The standard move against a citizen who has noticed something is to withhold part of the record, then disqualify anyone who reasons without it. A gap that travels inside the post, tagged with why it is missing, turns that silence into a recorded fact somebody else can go after. Naming the gaps is that discipline written down.
A chain other people can parse is also what makes private conclusions add up to anything. One citizen reasoning alone is a person with a file. A thousand publishing reasoning that composes is the start of a position a community can stand behind, which is where Communities picks the story up.
What keeps it honest
- The publish control is specified and not built yet. The record format, the account requirement and the snapshot rule are decided and written down; the checkbox itself is still on the build list, and the flag it sets is a stub today. This page says so rather than letting you assume it is live.
- It is optional and never automatic. Individual Mode is complete without publishing anything. No background sync, no default-on sharing, nothing leaving your machine unless you send it.
- A post is not the movement's record. Publishing never edits what the movement asserts about a law, a vote, or a person. That changes only through the proposals route, where a file committed to the public repository is the approval. An argument and a record are different things and the product keeps them apart.
- Trust weighting is believability, not agreement. A trust score answers one question — is this a real, believable citizen — never what that citizen believes. It changes how much weight a reader gives a post, and never makes the post correct.
Works with
- Run It On Your Own Computer — the local, accountless mode where all the reasoning happens before any of it is published.
- The Public Data Repository — the movement's shared evidence base, which a published post argues from and never edits.
- The Citizen Mining Network — the same pattern applied to gathering evidence: citizens' own machines doing work that composes into a shared record.
Where to go next
- Decisions — how a question becomes the structured record that gets published.
- Community consensus — what happens when many citizens' positions are pooled.
- Communities — the workspaces where the pooled version of this work lives.
- One App, Four Doors — where to go for the version of this argument written for your own party.
- Take Action — what a citizen can do this week, including the work worth publishing when it is done.