About Factkeeper - Chronicles & Communities

Welcome to Factkeeper

We are building civic infrastructure for communities to document the issues that matter to them. Each community maintains a Chronicle—a verified, structured record of events organized around a specific topic or domain of interest.

What is a Chronicle?

A Chronicle is a curated collection of events—documented occurrences that are significant to a particular community or subject area. Each event is anchored to verifiable sources (news articles, official documents, public records) and may reference people and organizations involved.

Think of a Chronicle as a living timeline: events build upon each other to tell a larger story, but every claim is traceable back to its primary source material. Examples of Chronicles might include:

Local government accountability for a city or county
Environmental issues affecting a specific region
Industry-specific regulatory actions
Historical documentation of a social movement
Community development and planning decisions

Community Roles

Each Chronicle is maintained by a team of trained volunteers who ensure the quality and accuracy of the historical record:

Reviewers — Perform initial screening of submitted events. They check for spam, verify that sources are accessible, and ensure submissions meet basic quality standards before passing them to curators.

Curators — Conduct detailed research and verification. They validate facts against sources, add context, identify related events and people, and prepare entries for publication. Curators have access to AI-assisted analysis tools to help parse documents and identify relevant information.

Chronicle Administrators — Manage the overall Chronicle, define inclusion criteria, oversee the editorial team, and ensure consistency across the historical record.

Beyond the editorial team, the broader community can participate by browsing the Chronicle to stay informed, or by submitting events for the team to consider including and verifying.

Sources and Evidence

Every event in Factkeeper must be anchored to verifiable sources. Sources are typically web links to:

News articles from recognized publications
Official government documents and meeting minutes
Court filings and legal documents
Press releases and official statements
Academic papers and research reports
Archived social media posts (with appropriate context)

In the future, Factkeeper will also support uploaded documents for primary source material that may not be available online.

Tags and Inclusion Criteria

Tags describe what an event is about—topical labels like "Healthcare" or "Congress" that help users browse and filter events. Inclusion Criteria explain why an event belongs in the Chronicle—the editorial standards that curators must justify when documenting an event. Tags answer "what topic?", criteria answer "why does this matter here?" Each Chronicle defines its own tags and inclusion criteria, allowing different Chronicles to focus on distinct subject areas and editorial missions.

The Curation Process

When an event is submitted, it enters a multi-stage review workflow:

Submission — Anyone can submit an event with supporting source links. Submitters receive a tracking ID to monitor their submission's status.
Review — Reviewers screen submissions for quality, checking that sources are valid and the event meets the Chronicle's inclusion criteria.
Curation — Curators perform deep verification, cross-referencing sources, adding context, linking related people and events, and preparing the entry for publication.
Publication — Approved events become part of the permanent Chronicle, visible to the public with full source attribution.

Throughout this process, curators have access to AI-assisted analysis tools that help parse large documents, extract key facts, identify potential bias, and surface related information. However, all final decisions are made by human judgment—AI assists the research, but humans verify and approve the record.

Get Involved

We are actively onboarding new communities who want to document their chronicle of interest. If you represent a group interested in creating a verified historical record for your domain, please contact us to learn more about becoming a Chronicle Partner.

For our principles and approach to information integrity, see our Mission & Methodology.