The plan
Eight phases, grounded in what is actually live.
The Commons treats current civic information, participation, durable evidence and reviewed context as one system. The central rule is simple: suggested material does not become reviewed civic knowledge merely because it was submitted, discovered or generated. Promotion remains an explicit human decision with provenance.
Read-only civic aggregation
The original foundation is complete: local journalism, official records, RSS/Atom, YouTube/video, filtered London-wide material, community organisations and monitored public pages converge on one chronological provenance-rich stream, with seven-town/topic/source-class filtering, visible source health, source submissions, Ealing Council publishing, Document Watch and direct Open Council Network public Ealing summaries. Further source discovery, registry migration and parser resilience are continuing operations rather than unfinished Phase 1 work.
Stable civic items & moderated participation
Items have durable Commons URLs and thread identities. Residents can submit corrections, evidence, related sources, local information and context for human review; approved additions are published with provenance rather than engagement ranking.
Follow, RSS & email delivery
Stories, sources, places and topics can be followed without an account. Browser follows, portable personal RSS and double-opt-in email alerts share the same civic source universe.
Persistent civic memory & Archive
Normalised items are archived every 15 minutes and remain available after RSS expiry. The browsable Civic Archive supports search, source, place and topic filtering, while reviewed new context can resurface an older story as fresh Commons activity without changing its original publication date or publisher.
Phase 5
Active · major v1 liveOfficial publishing & Document Watch
Ealing Council feeds, 47 registered council document collections, London Assembly/City Hall material, official video and Ealing-filtered Met sources feed the same civic pipeline. OCN’s public Ealing meeting summaries are already integrated through a conservative public-page bridge. ModernGov interoperability and a possible formal OCN API/partnership remain useful parallel work, not blockers.
Reviewed civic graph & research context
People, organisations, places, topics and issues have first-class Commons identities. Curated research adds reviewed relationships, descriptions and source links. The continuing housekeeping target is the identity + description + provenance + source standard for every public entity.
Phase 7
7A + 7B complete · 7C nextStructured review & civic knowledge
7A delivered the durable private review queue, moderation states and audit trail. 7B now publishes accepted story contributions automatically, keeps accepted/published states distinct, supports safe withdrawal/retry, emails contributors on receipt and meaningful decisions, and provides private bookmarkable status pages. 7C will extend deliberate promotion rules to source submissions, evidence suggestions and relationship suggestions — one type at a time.
Automation, search & resilience
Archiving, alerts, review persistence and research exports are already automated. Remaining work includes scalable archive indexing, registry-driven source configuration, grouped/searchable source facets, source-health tooling, parser/caching hardening, safer version handling and automatic completeness checks.
Immediate next slice
Turn accepted evidence into connected civic memory.
- Build Phase 7C promotion rules for accepted source submissions and evidence suggestions first, then relationship suggestions.
- Connect accepted evidence to civic memory: archived stories, Document Watch records, issues, entities and earlier reporting, without copying or displacing the canonical source.
- Scale Archive indexing and search so a rapidly growing source universe stays fast and complete rather than relying indefinitely on whole-store scans.
- Make source filtering scale with searchable/grouped source families as dozens of source identities become hundreds.
- Finish the entity completeness audit and automate checks for newly incomplete records.
- Continue deliberate source expansion while strengthening registry-driven configuration, caching, parser tests and source-health tooling.
- Continue ModernGov interoperability work and explore an OCN partnership/API arrangement in parallel. The existing OCN public-page bridge is sufficient for current timeline coverage; neither is a blocker.
The boundary still matters. Original publishers and official records remain canonical. Provenance stays visible. A bare name is not a finished civic entity. Historical and current organisations are framed in time rather than flattened together. Participation and civic assertions are moderated, not popularity-ranked. Private submitter data remains private. External social systems may connect later, but Civic Commons keeps its own public URLs, subscriptions, reviewed contributions and civic relationships.
The implementation-level roadmap lives with the project itself: docs/ROADMAP.md.