What is a problem record
The parts
A statement. One named thing wrong with society, in plain language.
Severity, category, and scope. How bad, what kind, and how far it reaches.
Who is harmed. Named specifically. A problem that harms "everyone" usually turns out to be a mood rather than a problem, and being forced to answer this question is a useful filter.
A root-cause chain. The separable harms underneath the statement, each with its own id. This is the most consequential field in the record.
The social-contract violation. Which structural commitment is breached — the link to the yardstick without which the record is only an opinion.
The desired outcome. What "fixed" looks like, concretely enough to tell whether it happened.
Priority and status. Where it sits, and where it is in its lifecycle.
The frozen key
Every problem gets a problem_key at creation — a lowercase, underscored slug — and it never
changes. Titles improve, severity moves, sources accumulate. The key is the identity, because a link
somebody shared two years ago must still resolve to the same problem.
Two files, on purpose
Each problem is stored as a structured file a machine can parse, plus a generated human-readable companion. The structured one drives the product; the companion is what somebody reads in a text editor without our software.
Neither is a degraded copy of the other. That is the same pattern decisions use, for the same reason.
Why root causes matter more than anything else
Because everything downstream is measured against them.
A fix bill claims to close specific numbered causes, and the coverage matrix shows which ones it leaves open. Without separable causes, "does this bill fix the problem" is an argument. With them, it is a grid.
Splitting a grievance into causes is also the step where vagueness dies. "They will not release it" is one feeling. "No statutory duty to produce by a date; an exemption broad enough to cover anything; classification applied to conclusions rather than sources; no penalty for silence; nobody outside the agency able to check" is five drafting targets.
Who may write one
Creating and modifying a problem is admin-gated, because a problem record is a claim the whole movement makes. Anyone may propose one, and the proposal is a request that never touches the record until an admin approves it — with a stated reason if they do not.