Verification and disputes

Karma is only worth having if it is hard to fake. Most of the design here is about that.

Every action carries its evidence

An action-completed record is one file with a URL and a description. The link is the point: a call that happened, a post that exists, a meeting somebody else attended, a source that was added. An action with no evidence is a claim, and claims do not score.

Peer reporting

A citizen can report another citizen's work, positively. This is the highest-quality signal in the system, because it is the one nobody can generate for themselves — and it is how the organizing work that leaves the least paper trail gets credited at all.

Verification, and freezing

An action is verified before it scores, and its points are frozen at that moment. That single rule removes a whole class of gaming: there is no benefit to timing your submissions around a catalog change.

Anti-gaming

The rules that matter most:

• Evidence a stranger can check, not evidence only you can see.
• Corroboration for anything that leaves no trace — the organizing tracks lean on peer reporting for exactly this reason.
• The month as the unit, which flattens bursts and rewards records.
• No self-corroboration, in any arrangement.
• A dispute lifecycle with a real outcome, described below.

Disputes

Anybody can dispute an action they believe did not happen or was miscounted. A dispute goes to an adjudication queue and comes back with a decision and a stated reason the parties can read.

Nothing is silently reversed, and nothing is silently kept. The pattern is the same one that governs proposals everywhere in this product: a refusal somebody can read is still somebody who was heard.

What karma never buys

Karma feeds your merit weight in one arithmetic. It does not approve anything, publish anything, or override an admin. Merit buys attention, never authority — and that rule is what makes it safe to score citizens at all.