Ealing reference implementation · updated 20 September 2026
Ealing Civic Commons connects live local publishing, reviewed civic memory and validated official records around durable places and issues. The newest source work adds Ealing Culture through its structured WordPress API without recreating the council site's full “What's on?” product. The wider Civic Commons network, Charter of the Commons and Start a Civic Commons guide remain separate from this Ealing implementation roadmap.
Where we are now
Discovery, participation, following, persistent memory, official publishing, planning discovery, review, the civic graph and an open conversation layer all have substantial working versions. Planning now retains validated applications across weekly refreshes, while source integration is moving beyond “can we fetch it?” toward “what belongs in a civic commons?”. Ealing Culture is the first explicit example: news can enter, civic/community events are filtered in selectively, and venue/creative directories remain reference-only.
September milestone
Ealing PAM planning applications from the latest validated completed week are exposed as Commons records. Conservative town links and deliberately reviewed site links connect them to place pages, and issues can inherit planning context through a reviewed primary place. The first live example is application 263308CND at 2 The Straight, connected to Southall, Southall Gasworks and the Southall Gasworks redevelopment issue.
The public site reads validated committed data rather than scraping PAM on page load. Partial ingests fail closed. Documents, drawings and mapping tiles are not mirrored. The council register remains authoritative.
Durable planning history is now live: planning-latest.json remains the current latest-week view, while planning-archive.json retains earlier applications across successful weekly refreshes. Stable planning routes, place dossiers and issue dossiers read that archive so an application does not disappear merely because it leaves a later weekly list. The next step is fuller lifecycle observation — especially decisions/status changes, related applications and democratic context.
Conversation milestone
Commons Chat now runs the open-source RSS.chat client/server as a separate public conversation service. Civic Commons items can start or discover discussions, and bound chat roots carry the canonical civic-object URL/type through the server and RSS output.
Micro.blog manual cross-posting into Commons Chat is verified. That gives writers a practical route from their canonical blog/article into the local conversation while keeping the original publication canonical. The next interoperability test is deliberately incremental: use the open Commons Chat RSS feed as a Micro.blog source and test onward syndication to Bluesky and Mastodon before considering native federation.
Read the Commons Chat architecture & interoperability notes →
Source-governance milestone
The Commons now reads Ealing Culture's public WordPress REST collections directly. News can enter the normal official-source timeline, while events require explicit civic/community relevance such as public art, libraries, heritage, community activity, regeneration/consultation, green space, youth/schools or accessibility/inclusion.
Ordinary entertainment listings remain on Ealing Culture. Venue and Creative Directory records are kept as reference data for possible future graph relationships rather than exposed as standalone Commons directories, and Creative Directory entries do not automatically become civic people profiles.
Geography stays explicit: “All Ealing” is a viewer-level no-filter choice; publisher “Boroughwide” metadata is not the same thing; Park Royal remains cross-boundary source geography rather than an eighth Ealing town. The event filter will be tuned from observed live results.
The plan
Ealing treats current civic information, participation, durable evidence and reviewed context as one system. Places are an explicit long-lived organising unit: a place can accumulate current facts, local evidence, recent Commons material, primary evidence, historical reporting, reviewed relationships and retained planning history. Rich sources can also contribute selectively without the Commons cloning their whole product.
Local journalism, official records, RSS/Atom, structured first-party APIs, video, community publishing and monitored public pages converge on one chronological provenance-rich stream, with town/topic/source filtering and visible source health. Ealing Culture is now integrated selectively as official civic context.
Items have durable Commons URLs and thread identities. Corrections, evidence and context can be submitted for review and published without engagement ranking.
Stories, sources, places and topics can be followed without an account through browser follows, personal RSS and double-opt-in email.
Normalised items persist beyond feed expiry in the Civic Archive. Entity/place/issue dossiers present current context first and deeper evidence/history on demand.
Ealing Council publishing, ModernGov, OCN summaries, Document Watch, PAM planning data and selective Ealing Culture material feed the same civic layer while preserving official sources as canonical. Next: planning decisions/status history, stronger democratic relationships and evidence-led tuning of broad-source filters.
People, organisations, places, topics and issues have first-class Commons identities. Planning-to-place relationships carry explicit provenance; reference-only datasets such as Ealing Culture venues/creatives remain candidates for later reviewed relationships rather than automatic profiles.
The durable review queue, publication flow and contributor feedback are live. Phase 7C extends deliberate promotion rules to source, evidence and relationship suggestions.
Archiving, alerts, research exports, source adapters and planning snapshot/archive refresh are automated. Remaining work includes scalable indexing, richer planning lifecycle/versioning, parser/API regression tests and source-filter monitoring.
Ealing, Acton, Greenford, Hanwell, Northolt, Perivale and Southall have local marks and town-aware views without splitting the underlying civic data. “All Ealing” is a viewer filter, not publisher geography.
RSS.chat provides a separate, replaceable conversation layer with public feeds/API, civic-object binding and chronological discussion. Micro.blog cross-posting into Commons Chat is verified; Bluesky/Mastodon bridge testing comes next before any native federation work.
civiccommons.co.uk is the network front door. The Charter defines shared principles while Start a Civic Commons explains how another locality can build its own version.
Immediate next slice
Network home · Charter · Start a Civic Commons · Ealing implementation documents · implementation-level Markdown roadmap.