✦ The Method ✦
Sourced. Dated. On the record.
OP1776 News is a civic-transparency ledger covering every county commission, school board, city council, statehouse, and Congress in the United States. This page documents how we gather the record, how we publish it, and the rules we hold ourselves to.
Principles
Source-first
Every meeting card, every roster, every vote points to a primary document — agenda PDF, official minutes, livestream archive, or the chamber's own roll-call sheet. We summarize. We do not paraphrase the record.
Names + dates always
Roll calls, not summaries. Who voted yes, who voted no, who didn't show. Long-form dates ("Wednesday, June 3, 2026"), never abbreviated. Full names and roles on first mention.
Filing in progress, not 'coming soon'
When a state is not yet on the record, we say so plainly: "Filing in progress." We do not pretend a chamber is covered until its rosters, meetings, and source links are in place.
How a chamber gets on the record
- 01
Scaffold the chamber
We pull the official roster from the body's own website — names, seats, party (if partisan), term ends, public contact information. Nothing scraped from third-party aggregators without verification.
- 02
Wire the next meeting
Date, time, location, regular schedule, agenda URL, livestream URL, Zoom ID + passcode, call-in line, public-comment rules. If any field is unknown, we leave it blank rather than guess.
- 03
Link the source
Every claim is one click from its citation: the agenda PDF, the meeting minutes, the chamber's own livestream replay. If we cannot link it, we do not publish it.
- 04
File the record
Updates are versioned. When a roster changes — a resignation, an appointment, an election — we keep the prior record dated and visible. The ledger is cumulative.
Data tiers
Every state carries one of four tiers. The tier drives what you see on its page — not a separate template, just a different surface area of the same record.
| Tier | What's on the record | Day-one states |
|---|---|---|
| Live | Full rosters, next meetings, daily brief, source links | Colorado |
| Rosters | Counties and commissioners only | — |
| Skeleton | Counties listed; rosters filing in | — |
| Filing | Map and landing only — "On the record by Q3 2026" | All 49 + DC |
Voice & tone
Always
- ✦Long-form dates ("Wednesday, June 3, 2026")
- ✦Full names + roles on first mention
- ✦"The board voted 5–2 to approve" — neutral, factual
- ✦"Filing in progress" / "Sourcing now" / "On the record by Q3 2026" for missing data
- ✦Roman numerals where ordinals would normally go
Never
- ×"Coming soon" / "Stay tuned" / "404" / "Sorry"
- ×"The board correctly voted" — no editorializing
- ×06/03/26 date format
- ×Italic body copy
- ×Emojis (use ornaments)
Privacy
We collect the minimum needed to deliver the brief: your email, optionally your zip and phone for local alerts, and a short note on what you care about. We don't sell it. We don't share it. We don't run third-party ads. You can reply STOP to texts or unsubscribe from email at any time and the record is deleted within 30 days.
Corrections
Saw a roster entry that's wrong? An out-of-date meeting time? A vote we miscounted? Send the receipts to corrections@op1776news.com. We post every correction with a timestamp at the top of the affected page. Mistakes get fixed in public.
That's the method. Now help us run it.