How this was built

This is a prototype from a News Futures Working Group project, the Civic Information Codex. It answers from a small knowledge bank: the structure of the Civic Media Cookbook and its 50 projects, public census facts for test places in California and New Jersey, and research studies linked to the Cookbook’s recipes.

Each answer is made in four steps. An open model picks the parts of the bank that matter. Code follows the bank’s links and gathers facts, including what is missing. A second call writes the answer from those facts only. Code then checks every citation. Each part of the answer says whether it is grounded in the bank, informed by it, or beyond the bank.

The full story of how it was made, with every decision written down, will live at civicinformation.org.