ConservaNode Improving the world - one node at a time
Early prototype: facts from Federal Register notices and DOJ press releases. Data is released under CC0. See About & Methodology.

How it works

Public documents go in, checked facts with links to their sources come out. No people are named, and nothing here is an accusation.

Six independent agents, one job each

ConservaNode is a chain of small agents. Each does a single job, never calls the others, and one failing does not block the rest.

  1. Collect. Fetches public documents from official sources, politely, and keeps the raw text.
  2. Mask names. Blanks out any person, company or vessel name before anything is stored.
  3. Extract. Pulls out facts only: species, places, routes, dates, case stage, statute.
  4. Load. Writes each fact with a pointer to the exact place in the source document that supports it.
  5. Audit. Re-checks the stored facts against the sources and flags anything that does not hold up.
  6. Publish. Exports the checked data and builds this site from it.

Rules every agent follows

Polite fetching

Collectors read each site's robots.txt, honour its crawl delays, identify themselves honestly, and stop on any refusal. Each source is fetched at most once per hour.

Names are masked before storage

Names of people, companies and vessels are blanked out before text is stored, so they never reach the database, the exports or this site. The same length of mask is kept so evidence positions stay valid.

Facts, not prose

Only facts are kept, each with a short pointer (document fingerprint and character positions) to its source. The wording of the original is not republished.

U.S. federal public-domain sources first

We start with documents published by the U.S. federal government, which are public domain. Other sources come later and only on the same terms.

An audit trail anyone can check

Every document that enters the system is recorded in an append-only ledger. Each entry includes the fingerprint of the one before it, so changing or deleting history would break the chain. The database refuses edits and deletions to the ledger.

A read-only endpoint re-computes the whole chain on request: https://api.conservanode.org/api/v1/audit/verify ↗. It reports whether the chain is intact and how many entries it holds. It cannot change anything.