Bearing Diligence
Get your bearings before the meeting. Do your research. Show your sources.
The gap between public and known
The bodies that govern local life, the assembly, the school board, the utility cooperative, publish what they are about to decide. It arrives as packets: budgets, contracts, amendments, staff reports, hundreds of pages per meeting, every meeting. The records are public. Almost nobody reads them. Nearly half of local public meetings happen with no reporter in the room, and the gap between what is technically public and what anyone actually knows is where accountability quietly dies.
Institutions have always had staff to read the record. The people they answer to have not. That asymmetry is old; what is new is that it has become fixable.
A private research desk over public records
Bearing Diligence is open-source software that turns a folder of meeting packets into something you can actually use: running on a computer you own, local AI models read the record, tell you what changed since the last packet, answer your questions with a quote under every sentence, and refuse to say anything the record does not support. The records are public. Your research into them is nobody's business but yours.
Who it is for
- Community members and engaged residents. Follow the two or three bodies you care about without making it a second job, or get your bearings for the one meeting that suddenly matters: the rezoning on Thursday's agenda, the budget line that touches your street, the item you mean to speak on at public comment. Open the packet, see what moved, ask what a line item means, and walk into the room with an answer that shows the page it came from.
- Local reporters. A beat memory that reads the 250 pages before the meeting and surfaces what changed, which is where stories live. And a line of inquiry that stays private until you publish: questions asked through a cloud service can be obtained from the provider without you ever knowing, while research on your own machine can only be reached by serving you, with every protection the profession has.
- Board directors. Oversight means asking questions the organization you oversee should not get to read. A director's diligence on an account that organization administers is not private; diligence on her own machine is.
Built to be checked, not believed
- Private by default, with proof. Your documents are read, compared, and source-checked entirely on your own computer, and the test suite verifies that asking a question makes zero off-machine calls. Want a bigger model for answers? That is a per-folder choice that tells you exactly what would leave before anything does, routed only to providers that retain nothing.
- Receipts, not confidence. Every sentence of an answer cites a located passage, and a quote gate refuses text it cannot find in the record. Where the record is silent, the answer says so instead of guessing.
- Documents are data, never instructions. A packet is untrusted input: text a reader cannot see is disclosed rather than obeyed.
- A change record, not a chatbot. The first product of a new packet is what code can verify: what changed against everything before it, coverage stated, with any model's reading kept as a draft that is never a source.
- Even the refusals carry evidence. It tracks vote totals rather than per-voter names, because a field that is empty in most packets makes a record look like it knows something it does not. The only annotated public corpus of municipal minutes, VotIE, independently backs that choice: named dissent is under 2% of its vote annotations.
Proven, not promised
Bearing Diligence runs end to end on real public board agendas today, and more of it is proven than most software ever is: one command runs the tests, the code gates, and the document checks, and every guard is shown able to fail by deleting it and watching something notice. Even the AI models were chosen by measurement rather than reputation, scored against each other on fixed questions over public agendas, with the losing scores published. And it is early enough that the first residents and reporters to pick it up will shape what it becomes.
The receipts are not decoration; they are the design. The one published benchmark for this material found extraction tools scoring 93% in the cities they trained on and 17% in the next town over, because every body writes its minutes differently. Bearing Diligence never asks you to trust an aggregate: every sentence shows the passage behind it, so an answer is exactly as good as the quote you can read for yourself.
Open source
The code, the tests, and the checks that prove every claim on this page are open source under MIT at github.com/news-community/bearing-diligence-oss. Run npm run check and watch it prove itself.
Why a news company builds this
Communities News exists because local coverage collapsed, and the packet nobody reads is the beat nobody staffs. The same standard that governs our newsroom, every claim carrying its source, is what this tool enforces in software, for anyone. A better-read public record makes better residents, better reporters, and better boards, and that is the business we are in.