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The README described intent; the repo is now real. Rewrote it to reflect what actually exists — 17,506 validated files across four entity types, the deterministic pipeline, the commands — and added the /docs tree: government-as-code.md the philosophy: git primitives -> government data-model.md entity types, IDs, file format, the tree, determinism sources.md where every fact comes from, and how current roadmap.md done / next / later, honest about what isn't built contributing.md the disciplines, and how to add a source Plus data/sources/sources.yaml — the machine-readable source registry. Every count, path, and source claim is grounded in the current tree, not the aspirational brief. Internal links verified; validation still clean. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Roadmap
An honest account of what exists, what's next, and what's further out. This repository will always be evolving; there is no "finished."
Done
- The substrate — repo-canonical, OKF markdown + YAML frontmatter, JSON-Schema validated, deterministic build (byte-identical on rerun).
- Four entity types, 17,506 files — Person (11,285), Body (233), Candidate (2,494), Jurisdiction (3,494).
- The federal government, structurally — every member of Congress, the chambers, 49 committees and 181 subcommittees with their leadership, and every member's committee seats.
- The nationwide county skeleton — all 3,131 U.S. counties as demographic nodes, plus 363 congressional districts, from Census ACS.
- The 2026 federal candidate field — every FEC filing as a Candidate.
- Florida to the ground — officeholders down to the municipal level across all 67 counties.
- The pipeline —
make build/validate/changelog/check, standard-library only. - The changelog engine — git diffs rendered as a plain-language civic changelog.
- The Board — a self-contained coverage map (
viz/board.html).
Next
- Self-updating mirror — a GitHub Action running
make checkon every push, then a scheduled job that pulls a fresh Atlas export, rebuilds, and commits the changelog automatically. This is the point where the mirror maintains itself and the daily civic changelog becomes real (the first re-sync diff, where only genuine government changes surface). - The demographic choropleth — the Board already has ACS data for every county; shade the map by population, income, and poverty, turning it from a coverage indicator into an instrument.
- State and local bodies — Bodies currently exist only at the federal level. Mint them for state legislatures and, following the Florida depth, county commissions and city councils.
- Graph export — a loader that walks the tree and builds the relationship graph (Memgraph) as a materialized view, so the repo can rehydrate the graph rather than the reverse.
Later
- The issues axis — cross-cutting
Issueentities that link people, bodies, and places across the jurisdiction tree, so the mirror answers "who, nationwide, is touching this issue?" and not only "who governs here?" - The money layer — donations, contracts, and grants as sourced event files; the flows that make influence legible (the Sankey / "circuit-breaker" views from the brief).
- Meetings and agendas — the highest-value local data, and the hardest: scraped from Legistar / Granicus / CivicPlus portals and, where towns publish nothing in text, from meeting video. A new agenda item is a diff with a deadline — a mission.
- Contribution as correction — let people propose fixes to the mirror (a wrong phone number, a missed meeting) as pull requests, making the public literal contributors to their own civic record.
Non-goals
Deliberately out of scope, to keep the mirror honest and buildable:
- Becoming an authority. This is a mirror; official sources remain the source of truth.
- A heavy web application, database dependency, or graph-database setup in the core repository. The substrate stays flat files.
- Ingesting all of government at once. Depth follows attention, county by county.