Clone the record

git clone https://github.com/ACT3ai/data_we_citizens.git

That is the entire public record of the movement, on your disk, readable without our software.

Reading it without the app

Every record is a flat file. Open problems/ in a text editor and you are reading the movement's list of what is wrong, each file carrying its root causes and its sources. Open laws/problem_laws/ and you are reading the laws we hold responsible. Open politicians/legacy/ and you are reading the records of 1,300 people who held office.

No tooling required. grep works. git log works, which means you can see what we changed and when — the edit history of the movement's claims is part of the public record too.

The app reads what is already there

The We The Citizens app does not have a hidden copy of the data. It reads this repository from your disk. That is why a fresh install asks you to clone it before it will do anything: the app without the record is an empty shell, and it says so plainly rather than looking broken.

The setup screen re-checks on its own. You paste the clone command into a terminal, switch back to the browser, and the app has already let you in — no refresh, no button, no restart.

The rule that came out of getting this wrong

Cache a yes forever if you like; never cache a no.

An earlier version remembered that the repo was missing for the life of the process, so a citizen who had just cloned it sat looking at a screen insisting it was absent. That is our own deadlock — you cannot prove it, so you cannot proceed — served by the app that exists to argue against it. Any screen reporting the absence of something the user is actively creating must re-ask on its own.

Look generously, accept strictly

The app probes a wide range of plausible locations for the repository, and still only accepts a directory that carries the marker file. And when it does not find one it tells you what it saw — "there is a folder there and it is missing its marker" is a different instruction from "clone this", and only one of them matches what you are looking at.