Version 1.0 — 2026 Corio | Norlane | North Shore
The register carries experience back intact. The digest turns it into understanding. Together they are the civic metabolism of a community that remembers itself.
LocalRegister is pre-political civic infrastructure. It is a permanent, tamper-evident, community-owned register of what residents of 3214 have raised, what responses have been received, and what remains unresolved.
LocalRegister does not advocate for political positions. It does not align with any party, faction, or ideology. It records what is, rather than prescribing what should be. The community decides what to do with what the register contains.
LocalRegister is the community’s receipt. When a concern has been registered, it cannot be claimed it was never raised.
For a long time, consultation in 3214 has felt tokenistic. Issues are raised, consultations happen, decisions are made — but no shared memory persists. Each new group starts from zero. Each new consultation finds no record of what came before. The same issues are raised again and again, each time treated as if they are new.
This is not simply neglect. It is a structural problem. The community’s record has historically been held by institutions — in councillors’ offices, agency files, consultation reports — rather than by the community itself. When the record is held elsewhere, the community cannot hold institutions to account.
LocalRegister exists to return the record to the community.
LocalRegister is not a government initiative. It is not funded by, affiliated with, or accountable to any council, agency, or political party.
LocalRegister is not a campaign. It does not take positions on what should be done about the issues it records. It records that they have been raised, what responses came back, and what the current status is.
LocalRegister is not owned by any individual. It is not Paul’s project, or Alice’s project, or any founding member’s project. It belongs to the community of 3214 and to no one else.
Register comes from the Latin regesta — things carried back. From re (back) and gerere (to carry, to conduct). To register something is to carry it back into the record, intact, where it cannot be lost or denied.
Digest comes from the same root — dis + gerere — carried apart, made nourishing. The digest is not a replacement for the register. It is what the community draws from the register: patterns, evidence, understanding.
Most consultation digests what communities say. LocalRegister registers it.
These principles are the constitutional foundation of LocalRegister. They constrain all editors, stewards, and participants. They can only be amended through the community process described in Section Five. No individual, no founding member, and no editor has the authority to override them.
1. The Register Belongs to the Community LocalRegister is community-owned infrastructure. It is not owned by any individual, organisation, political party, or government body. Every resident of 3214 has equal standing as a contributor and reader. No single person or group may claim ownership, control access, or act as the definitive authority on what the register contains.
2. Nothing in the Register Is Ever Deleted Once an entry is in the register, it cannot be removed. An editor may mark an entry as a duplicate, out of scope, or contested — but the original entry remains visible in the public record. This is the most important single rule. It is what makes the register a genuine record rather than a curated narrative. Deletion is not an editor power under any circumstances.
3. The Register and the Digest Are Separate The register is raw — experience carried back intact, unprocessed, as the community expressed it. The digest is processed — patterns drawn from the register, always traceable back to specific entries. Editors curate the digest. No one curates the register. These are two distinct functions with two distinct sets of permissions. Conflating them destroys the integrity of both.
4. All Editorial Decisions Are Publicly Logged Every action taken by an editor — elevating an issue to highlighted or pinned tier, marking an entry as a duplicate, writing a digest summary — is recorded in the version history with a timestamp and the editor’s name. Editors are accountable to the community through visibility, not through hierarchy. The edit history is the accountability mechanism.
5. Editors Are Custodians, Not Gatekeepers Editors maintain the infrastructure through which the community’s voice passes. They do not judge which concerns are legitimate. They do not filter based on their own views. They do not decide what matters. The community decides legitimacy through submissions and upvotes. Editors ensure the system functions correctly. A librarian does not decide which books are worth reading. LocalRegister’s editors are librarians.
6. The Register Is Pre-Political LocalRegister records what is happening in 3214 before political interpretation begins. A pollution spike at 11pm is a fact. A demand for a specific policy response is a political position. The register contains the first kind of statement. It does not take the second kind of position. This neutrality is what makes the register credible to all residents regardless of political affiliation. It must be actively protected.
7. Open Source and Publicly Readable The code, the structure, and all data in LocalRegister are publicly available. Any resident can read any entry without creating an account. Any community anywhere can fork the code and run their own instance. No login is required to access the record. Transparency is not a feature — it is the foundation.
8. The Register Persists Beyond Any Individual or Group LocalRegister is designed to outlast any founding member, any steward, and any group that currently uses it. If all current editors step back, the record remains. If one group fades, or another goes quiet, or any group disbands, their entries remain in the register. The record belongs to 3214, not to whoever is currently maintaining it.
Any resident of 3214 may submit an entry to the register. Submissions require no account, no membership, and no approval before entering the register.
Each entry contains:
Submitted — all entries begin here. Visible in the full register, searchable, upvotable.
Highlighted — entries elevated by two editors in agreement, based on public criteria. Appears on the homepage.
Pinned — entries elevated by two editors in agreement when two or more criteria are met: raised more than three times across any groups, corroborated by sensor data or FOI result, formally raised with an authority without adequate resolution, or identified as a cross-cutting issue affecting multiple areas of 3214.
Tier elevation criteria are public and may only be changed through the amendment process in Section Five.
Environmental data from community sensor nodes enters the register automatically, without human curation. Sensor entries are timestamped, geolocated, and linked to relevant issue entries where patterns exist.
FOI requests lodged by any resident on behalf of 3214 issues may be entered into the register: agency, what was requested, date lodged, statutory deadline, outcome, and a link to any released documents. Overdue FOI requests are automatically flagged when their statutory deadline passes.
The register contains what occurred in public, and what occurred in the exercise of public power. It does not contain private correspondence between residents, or between residents and organisations, conducted for the purpose of building relationships, gathering information, or organising — unless that correspondence later produces an outcome that all parties agree to record.
This distinction exists to protect a real and necessary space for residents, stewards, and editors to build trust, ask questions, and organise without every private exchange becoming part of a permanent public record. Without this protection, no one could safely have an exploratory conversation about LocalRegister itself, let alone about any other community matter, and the register’s own legitimacy would be undermined by the way it was built.
This protection is not absolute, and does not create a loophole for the exercise of public power. A private conversation between two residents about their own concerns is fully protected. A private conversation in which a person holding public power — an elected official, a minister’s office, a council officer, a representative of a publicly funded body — makes a commitment, takes a position, states a decision, or declines to act, on a matter of public concern, is different in kind.
In that case:
The principle is this: transparency obligations scale with public power, not with where a conversation took place. A private room does not place the exercise of public power beyond the reach of the public record. Ordinary residents organising privately are entitled to full privacy. Public officials exercising public power privately are not entitled to use that privacy to place their decisions permanently outside community memory.
Any entry made under this provision should be reviewed by two editors before publication, consistent with the two-editor rule in Section Four, given the greater sensitivity of recording an outcome without the consent of all parties involved.
Editors elevate entries to Highlighted or Pinned tier based on public criteria, write digest summaries, and maintain the technical infrastructure. They do not control what enters the register, do not delete entries, and do not represent LocalRegister publicly without explicit community authorisation.
Editors are named, accountable members of the 3214 community. Their names and editorial actions are publicly visible. There are no anonymous editors.
Founding editors: to be named at the inaugural community meeting of LocalRegister 3214.
A new editor may be proposed by any existing editor or registered contributor. The proposal is posted publicly for fourteen days for community comment. Addition requires unanimous agreement among existing editors.
By community petition (twenty registered contributors, or unanimous agreement of other editors) initiating a fourteen-day review period, followed by a community vote requiring a simple majority.
No editor may serve continuously for more than three years without community reconfirmation.
No consequential editorial decision may be made by a single editor acting alone. Elevating to Highlighted or Pinned tier, marking duplicates, and publishing digest documents all require two editors in agreement.
Any contributor who believes their submission was treated unfairly may lodge a formal appeal, itself entered into the register. The editorial group must respond within fourteen days.
The Founding Principles (Section Two) and tier elevation criteria (Section Three) require the full community process below. All other sections may be amended through editor consensus plus a seven-day public comment period.
Any registered contributor may propose an amendment. The proposal is entered into the register publicly for thirty days of comment, then a community vote requiring a two-thirds majority. The full outcome — count, comments, and votes — is entered into the register permanently. A failed amendment may not be resubmitted for twelve months.
One principle is permanently unamendable: Nothing in the Register Is Ever Deleted. This is the constitutional bedrock. The deletion prohibition may not be removed, weakened, or qualified through any amendment process.
Every version of this document is itself entered into the register, with the complete amendment history permanently part of the public record.
LocalRegister exists because a community that cannot remember itself cannot hold anyone to account.
It exists because the issues affecting 3214 — industrial pollution, housing, wellbeing, food security — have been raised before. They have been raised many times, in many groups, across many years. And each time, the conversation disappeared. The next group started from zero. The same things were said again, as if for the first time.
LocalRegister is the infrastructure that makes that impossible. Not by advocating for any particular response. Not by taking any political position. Simply by carrying the community’s experience back into a record that persists, that anyone can read, that no one can quietly edit, and that belongs to everyone in 3214 equally.
Editors are custodians, not gatekeepers. They maintain the register. The community fills it.
The community of 3214 — Corio, Norlane, North Shore — has the knowledge, the lived experience, and the collective capacity to understand what is happening here and to advocate for change. LocalRegister gives that capacity a memory.
— The Founding Community of LocalRegister 3214 3214.localregister.org
Intellectual foundations: Elinor Ostrom (commons governance), James Madison (constitutional design), Jürgen Habermas (procedural legitimacy and public sphere), Robert Michels (iron law of oligarchy), Lawrence Lessig (code as law), Walter Lippmann (custodian distinction), Jane Mansbridge (recursive representation), Nancy Fraser (subaltern counterpublics), Pierre Rosanvallon (counter-democracy), Maurice Halbwachs (collective memory).