Fabio
69 lines
4.4 KiB
Markdown
69 lines
4.4 KiB
Markdown
# Republic OS
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An open, version-controlled mirror of public power in the United States.
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Government is already software: statutes are code, agencies are processes, elections change the maintainers, and a bill is a pull request against the law. What government has never had is a **changelog**. This repository is that changelog.
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**The diff is the product.** Every file here mirrors the observable public state of a government entity or legal text as a deterministic, sourced, human-readable record. When government changes, the files change, and git makes the change visible, permanent, and inspectable.
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## What's in here today
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19,721 markdown records, every one schema-validated:
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| Entity | Count | What it is |
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| **Person** | 13,329 | Current officeholders — federal, all 50 state legislatures, and Florida down to the municipal level. Federal members carry their bioguide ID, leadership roles, and committee seats. |
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| **Body** | 233 | The institutions themselves — the U.S. House, the Senate, 49 committees, 181 subcommittees, each with its leadership. |
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| **Candidate** | 2,494 | Everyone running for federal office in 2026, from FEC filings. |
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| **Jurisdiction** | 3,494 | Every U.S. county (3,131) and 363 congressional districts, each carrying Census demographics — the nationwide skeleton, filled with data. |
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| **LegalText** | 171 | U.S. Code Title 52, Voting and Elections, mirrored from the official OLRC XML release current through Public Law 119-100. |
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The mirror answers, with receipts: *who holds power, who runs the institution, who's running, what each place is made of,* and now *what legal text governs elections* — and, through git, *what changed.*
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## How it works
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```
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raw source exports deterministic build validated tree
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data/*.jsonl ──► scripts/build.py ──► data/jurisdictions/**
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data/legal/raw ──► scripts/ingest_*.py ──► legal/**
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(committed as-is) (one pass) (OKF markdown + YAML)
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```
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- **Format** — Markdown with YAML frontmatter, [OKF](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/knowledge-catalog/blob/main/okf/SPEC.md)-conformant, validated by JSON Schema in [`/schemas`](schemas). Human-readable in any editor or on GitHub; machine-readable by any agent.
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- **Deterministic** — `make build` and `make legal-us-code` regenerate their trees from committed raw sources and pinned official snapshots. Records change only when government changes, so every diff is signal.
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- **Sourced** — every record carries field-level provenance and a confidence level. This repo is a *mirror*, never the authority; official sources remain the source of truth.
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- **Raw-first** — source exports land in `data/*.jsonl` untouched before any transformation, so the origin is always recoverable.
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## Commands
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```bash
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make build # regenerate the entity tree from the raw exports
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make legal-us-code # regenerate the U.S. Code Title 52 legal corpus seed
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make validate # OKF + schema + link-integrity checks on all records
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make changelog # what changed in the government since the last commit
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make check # build, then validate — the full gate
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```
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Everything runs on the Python standard library. No dependencies to install.
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## Documentation
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- [Government as Code](docs/government-as-code.md) — the philosophy: why git, and what its primitives mean for government
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- [Data Model](docs/data-model.md) — entity types, IDs, the file format, the jurisdiction tree
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- [Sources](docs/sources.md) — where every fact comes from, and how current it is
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- [Legal Corpus](docs/legal-corpus.md) — deterministic legal text mirroring, raw snapshots, manifests, and checksums
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- [Roadmap](docs/roadmap.md) — what exists, what's next
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- [Contributing](docs/contributing.md) — the disciplines, and how to add a source
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- [Technical Brief — Government as Software](Technical%20Brief%20—%20Government%20as%20Software.md) — the founding document
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- [CHANGELOG.md](CHANGELOG.md) — the civic changelog, generated from git history
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## The disciplines
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Three rules govern everything here, and they are won by subtraction:
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1. **Never overwrite** — a change is a new commit, not a clobbered file. Deletes are diffs.
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2. **Never rewrite history** — no force-push, no squash. The past is load-bearing.
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3. **Always push off-box** — one copy is a single point of failure; more is not.
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Substrate for [influence.tools](https://influence.tools).
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