Democracy Toolkit

Six steps to hold them accountable: speak, search, request, investigate, record, publish.

THE CREED

Stripping the Veil.

Public power belongs to the public, and so does every page it leaves behind. We do not characterize. We do not opine. We cite the record — and we do not stop.

NULLI CEDIMUS

[ ORIGIN ]

Power Abhors a Witness.

Civic action is a duty, not a hobby. Small governments are built on a single assumption: that the people they govern will not look. Votes happen in quiet rooms. Contracts disappear into consent agendas. Decisions get made between the meeting and the minutes. That assumption is not a conspiracy — it is the whole architecture, and showing up is what dismantles it.

Entrenched power lives on appointments. Elections get the attention. Appointments hold the power. Boards, authorities, and commissions are filled without a ballot, held for years, and decide budgets, contracts, and zoning along the way. Follow who was appointed, by whom, and to what — and the machine stops being invisible.

Sunlight is the disinfectant. Not commentary. Not accusation. The document itself, published where it cannot be quietly retracted. We use COIA, FOIA, and every applicable public statute to bring it into the open, because the records are public by law and we intend to collect all of them.

[ OPERATING DOCTRINE ]

01
CLOSE THE GAP

Citizens cannot hold power accountable without access to the same record power holds. We build that record. We make it public.

02
NO PARTY LINE

Corruption does not check voter registration. Neither do we. Party affiliation is irrelevant to the primary record.

03
LOCAL IS EVERYTHING

Your roads. Your taxes. Your zoning. Your school board. Those decisions are made locally — and that is where accountability must live.

04
SUSTAINED PRESSURE

One report is a data point. A documented record built over time is a case. We build the case — and we do not grant relief.

[ RECORD_PROTOCOL ]

How the Work Gets Done.

Every report begins with the source document. Everything built after that exists to keep it honest — so that any claim we publish can be walked back to the page it came from:

  • Government documents come in as filed — meeting minutes, budget filings, FOIA releases, procurement records — and are preserved exactly as received.
  • Names, dates, dollar figures, and procedural events are pulled from the document itself, never from someone's summary of it.
  • The Catalyst Civic Ontology links people to offices, offices to decisions, and decisions to the money that moved.
  • Nothing is characterized before it is verified. Nothing is published without a citation traceable to its source.

[ EXTRACTION_PROTOCOL ]

  • 01
    SOURCE INTAKE

    Raw PDFs, recordings, public filings, and CSV dumps preserved as-received.

  • 02
    RECORD EXTRACTION

    Names, dates, dollar values, and procedural events pulled directly from the source document.

  • 03
    CITATION LOCK

    Every published claim is permanently anchored to the document that supports it.