The diff is the product — now literally. generate_changelog.py reads a
git diff of the entity tree between any two refs and says, in plain
language, what changed in the government: entities added / modified /
removed, grouped by type and by jurisdiction, dated from the commit.
CHANGELOG.md is seeded from the real history so far:
- initial load: +11,285 people across 51 states
- institutional gap: +233 bodies, ~532 people enriched
- elections + demographics: +2,494 candidates, +3,494 jurisdictions
(TX +541, FL +396, CA +341 ...)
On an initial load every entity is an addition; on a re-sync of the same
source, only real government changes will surface — which is the whole
point. When nothing changed, it says so.
make changelog [BASE=.. HEAD=..]. No third-party deps.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The README claimed 'validated by JSON Schema' — now it is true.
/schemas holds a JSON Schema for each entity type (Person, Body,
Candidate, Jurisdiction): a stricter profile over OKF's permissive
base, tolerating unknown keys by design.
scripts/validate.py checks all 17,506 files with no third-party deps
(hand-rolled frontmatter parser + minimal schema engine):
1. OKF conformance — every file has frontmatter with a non-empty type
2. Schema conformance — required fields, property types, enums
3. Link integrity — internal /-rooted links resolve
Non-zero exit on failure, so it is a CI gate. Verified with a negative
test: it catches bad enums and dead links. All 17,506 files pass today.
Makefile ties it together: make build / validate / check.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two new entity types, built deterministically from the raw exports:
Candidate (2,494) — 2026 federal candidates as files under
us/states/<st>/candidates/, with office,
district, party, incumbent/challenger stance,
campaign committee, FEC id.
Jurisdiction (3,494) — demographic nodes carrying ACS 2023 data:
3,131 counties (deduped from 3,231 mixed-format
fips keys) + 363 congressional districts.
This completes the county skeleton nationwide: every US county is now a
browsable node with population, income, poverty, race, education and
housing — even where no officeholders are mapped yet. In Florida the
county index.md merges into the existing dir and reports its officeholder
count alongside demographics (St. Lucie: 33 officeholders + ACS profile).
build.py now reads seven raw inputs in one deterministic pass
(byte-identical on rerun). The mirror now answers: who holds power, who
runs this institution, who is running, and what each place is made of.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three new source datasets from Atlas, committed as-is before any build:
fec_candidates.jsonl 2,494 2026 federal candidates (officeholders.fec_data)
acs_county.jsonl 3,231 Census ACS 2023 by county (~100 dup keys to dedupe)
acs_cd.jsonl 363 Census ACS 2023 by congressional district
A new axis for the mirror: who is running (candidates) and the
demographics of each place (ACS). Keyed on fec_id / state+district /
county_fips — no person links yet. Raw first; the build into Candidate
and Jurisdiction entities follows.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The one radical view whose data is fully real today (brief §4.5).
Renders every officeholder in the mirror as coverage: teal is the
federal + state tier (the roof, every state), amber is county +
municipal depth (the foundation, so far only Florida). Click Florida
to descend into its 67 counties, shaded by local officeholder count.
Self-contained: inlined US state + FL county geometry, hand-rolled
lng/lat projection, vanilla JS — no external requests, no build deps.
Instrument aesthetic: dark ground, mono readout, breathing amber to
invite the drill-down. viz/coverage.json is generated from the tree.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The seat data answered 'who represents this place?' but not 'who runs
this institution?' — the Speaker of the House existed only as the rep
for LA-4. This adds the missing axis of institutional power.
New Body entities (233): the U.S. House, U.S. Senate, Executive Office,
49 committees, 181 subcommittees — each with its leadership.
Federal people (532/542) enriched with bioguide IDs, leadership roles,
and committee seats, reconciled from congress-legislators by name.
Mike Johnson is now Speaker of the House, not just LA-4.
Sources ingested directly into the repo (repo-canonical): Atlas
supplied bodies/leadership/committee_memberships via congress-legislators,
committed raw in data/. build.py supersedes convert_officeholders.py and
reads all four inputs in one deterministic pass (byte-identical on rerun).
The 10 unenriched federal records are a finding, not a bug: vacancies,
the President, and ~5 seats where Atlas's roster disagrees with the
authoritative current roster — model-vs-reality discrepancies to surface.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
One record, one file. The jurisdiction tree is now real:
us/people/ 542 federal
us/states/<xx>/people/ 7,561 state
us/states/fl/counties/<c>/people/ 1,058 county
.../municipalities/<m>/people/ 2,124 municipal (67 FL counties)
Each file is OKF markdown + YAML frontmatter: fixed key order,
field-level source provenance, Atlas UUIDs for round-tripping,
deterministic paths and slugs. Converter passes the determinism
test: two runs, byte-identical tree.
Generated by scripts/convert_officeholders.py from
data/officeholders-v2.jsonl (unchanged).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The only surviving copy of the dataset after the DB loss on
10.0.0.116 — committed as-is, before any transformation.
Federal (536), state (7,560), county (1,057), municipal (2,118)
current officeholders. Source: Atlas via /depot/exports,
generated 2026-07-03.
Raw first, refined later: the conversion into structured entity
files will itself be a visible diff.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Government as an operating system, git as its missing changelog.
The mirror architecture, influence as a computable tool, a visual
grammar for power, and the game layer that lights the map.
The diff is the product.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Fabio