The Movement Plan

A movement that asks you to judge officials against a written record owes you one of its own. The Plan is that record: what We The Citizens says it is going to do, published as a numbered document you read from the top rather than a dashboard you skim. Every item carries a button asking whether it belongs on the plan at all.

One committed file, with a frozen key beside every heading, is rendered into the document a citizen reads: item numbers computed fresh on each load, the vote directive turned into a real button, and each year a lens onto the same file that either tracks it, derives from it, or is locked.

What it does

The plan lives as one committed document in the movement's public data repository — a written file, not a table of records the page reports on. Groups come first, then the numbered items a citizen refers to out loud, then sub-sections inside an item such as How we know it's done. The page renders that document essentially as typed, with item headings the largest text on the page and group headings quiet above them.

Every group and item heading carries a frozen key, written visibly in the source beside the title, in the form {#open_source_voting}. A heading with no key is reported as a broken file. The software will not derive one from the title, and that refusal is the point: a key taken from a title means a copy-edit quietly re-files every answer already cast onto a different item. A title can be rewritten freely. A key never is.

The item numbers are computed on render, counted straight through the document, and never written into the file. Insert an item in the middle and everything below it renumbers. No answer moves, because no answer was ever filed under a number.

A directive puts a working control inside the document. Where the author types the vote directive, the renderer replaces it with a real Vote on this button for that item. An item whose author forgot one gets the button appended anyway. The ballot restates the item in full above the choice, asks one question — is this worth the movement's effort to fix — and says what Yes and No each mean before you pick.

Deliberately absent: status chips, owner chips, priority numbers, progress rollups. Those were the storage format leaking onto the page, and each one sat between the reader and the sentence it was decorating.

Behind the document sits a versioning layer a reader never has to think about. A year either tracks the living plan, derives from it with its own changes recorded on top, or is locked in as a frozen snapshot later edits no longer reach — which lets a past year sit beside what the movement now intends. Reading is never gated, including when signed out. Only admins edit it.

The goal it serves

A citizen who has just decided to help needs to know what the movement is going to do, in enough detail to disagree with it. A plan you can only skim as a table of chips is a dashboard. A plan you read end to end, and can answer item by item, is a commitment somebody can be held to a year later.

The argument the rest of this site makes is that officials should be measured against what they actually did, not against what they said they would do. A movement making that argument while publishing nothing checkable about itself would be asking for exactly the trust it says nobody should extend. The Plan is that standard turned inward: written down, committed in public, dated, open to anyone. Locking a year is the part that costs something — the movement can be shown what it committed to and asked what came of it, the same test the Charter sets for everything else here.

The vote button is there because a plan nobody can answer is a newsletter. Before you have looked at a single candidate or logged a single action, you can say whether an item belongs on the list, and that answer is recorded like every other position in the app. See The Movement for what joining involves and How It Works for where the plan sits in the wider loop.

What keeps it honest

• A broken file is reported, not hidden. A heading missing its key, a duplicate key, or a file that will not parse is named on the page — the file and the failing heading — above whatever still rendered.
• An unrecognised directive renders visibly, in place, saying what it said. It is never silently dropped, because a call to action that vanished from a published document is precisely the gap nobody would notice.
• No progress bar where there is nothing to count. A document plan carries no per-item status, so the rollup is hidden rather than reading "0 done". An absent bar is the truth. A zeroed one is a claim nobody made.
• The vote is not a finding. It records what citizens said about whether an item belongs on the plan — not how to fix the thing, not the wording, and it binds nobody. No tally is shown to you before you have answered.
• Answers outlive the items. Remove an item and the answers cast against it are kept and reported as orphaned, rather than deleted with the question that became inconvenient.

Works with

• Decisions, Areas And Communities — the plan ballot is the simplest case of the same recorded-position machinery: one question, one answer you can change later.
• Value Systems And Policy Packets — your own written rules are what you are really answering an item with when you say it belongs on the plan or does not.
• The First-Principles AI Check — a plan item states what the movement intends to do; the check tests whether the reasoning holds on its own rather than because the movement said it.

Where to go next

• The Movement — who this is, what joining means, and an honest account of what it costs.
• Charter — the founding commitments the plan is supposed to deliver on.
• How It Works — the core loop a citizen walks, and where the plan sits inside it.
• Start Here — the sixty-second version, if you arrived at this page first.
• Take Action — the things you can do this week, once you know what the movement is trying to get done.