Civic Action overview

Civic Action packages research-first, evidence-preserving workflows for public sources, meetings, records requests, public-technology procurement, local resource indexes, corrections, and publication review. It is an opt-in addon, not a jurisdiction database, law practice, autonomous newsroom, recorder, CMS, or outreach system.

Interaction model

Users describe the civic outcome and evidence boundary in a prompt. The AIWG steward handles opt-in setup, capability discovery, dependency checks, and provider-safe deployment; the selected civic skill then creates reviewable artifacts and stops at the appropriate human gate.

Act as the AIWG steward. Make Civic Action available for this project after
previewing the setup and obtaining approval. Then help me plan an evidence-bound
civic workflow for the material I provide. Establish jurisdiction and source
authority, preserve uncertainty and citations, explain every warning or blocked
condition, and stop before any submission, contact, recording, identification,
or publication.

The prompt-based quickstart provides focused asks for source review, public records, meetings, procurement, local resources, corrections, and publication. Direct setup and gate syntax is isolated in the Civic Action CLI reference for advanced operators and automation.

Safety and evidence model

The executable source, meeting, and publication commands validate their input schemas and block selected declared conditions, including access-control bypass, unresolved source authorization/rights, conflicted or unverified vote evidence, uncited declared material claims, incomplete named privacy/accessibility review, and missing independent, dated exact-hash publication approval. Publication claims use source/retrieval/selector citations, and empty claim or upstream-gate inventories cannot pass. Broader jurisdiction, consent, private/public status, anti-targeting, retention, and independent-review requirements are mandatory human workflow rules; the commands do not infer those facts from content.

Source identity and retrieval versions are distinct. Contracts provide fields for epistemic status, source/retrieval identity, selectors, contrary evidence, and review history. Correction artifacts plan linked new versions rather than silent replacements; the addon does not enforce an external storage history.

These choices follow W3C PROV-O, RFC 9309, the NIST AI RMF, the NIST Privacy Framework, and the SPJ Code of Ethics. The cited legal and standards research in `docs/research/` states scope and dissent explicitly. The `control-source-matrix.md` file maps each skill to its sources, tests, and executable-versus-declarative boundary.

Human authority

Machine gates return `pass|warn|block`; a pass only means no blocking condition was found among the declared fields inspected by that command. It does not authorize action, determine legality, or independently verify facts. A named human reviews the exact artifact and underlying evidence before recording, submission, outreach, identity assignment, legal assertions, publication, or correction release. External action remains outside the executable gates.

Composition

`aiwg-utils` supplies the Flow contract. Optional research-complete, media-curator, knowledge-base, media-marketing-kit, ops-complete, and security-engineering components add specialized capabilities. Their absence is reported honestly and never replaced with invented transcripts, citations, legal conclusions, accessibility conformance, or deployment evidence.