Infrastructure for Community Archives
We build and maintain open tools that enable communities to document, verify, and preserve their own history—for today and for generations to come.
The Challenge
Important events happen every day: policy decisions, institutional changes, community developments. These events deserve careful documentation, but the modern web is ephemeral. Links break. Articles disappear. Social media posts vanish. Communities need infrastructure to capture this history now, while sources are still accessible, to preserve it for their children and grandchildren.
We provide that infrastructure through our premier platform
Factkeeper
The Three Pillars of Factkeeper
Document
Individuals or communities submit events around a topic of interest (in our sytem called a Chronicle) with supporting sources such as news articles, official documents, and public records.
Verify
Volunteer reviewers and curators within each Chronicle check sources, cross-reference facts, and prepare records for publication. Verification requires human judgment but Factkeeper provides AI tools to expedite your research.
Preserve
Open Civic Systems serves as custodian of Chronicle content, maintaining multi-decade cold storage to ensure records remain accessible for future generations.
Our Role
Open Civic Systems builds and maintains the software tools, databases, amd preservation systems. Communities bring the interest, expertise, volunteer teams, and editorial judgment. We are custodians of the archive, not authors of the records. Each Chronicle community is responsible for the content it publishes.