alluv

About

The principles we build to. Most come back to one idea: information people are entitled to should be information they can actually use. They are aims, not guarantees. A project may depart from one, but only for a reason, stated plainly, and never in a way that works against what the principles are for.

  1. Public should mean usable

    A great deal of information is public by right and closed in practice: published as a scanned image, scattered across places nobody knows to look, written for specialists. Having the right to read something is not the same as being able to.

    Our work starts from that gap. Gathering, reading and laying information out so it can be used is the job, not a finish applied afterwards.

  2. Readable by anyone

    Plain language, with specialist terms explained where they appear. Pages that work on a small screen, a slow connection and with assistive technology.

    Accessibility is not a feature for some readers. It is what makes information available at all.

  3. Show the source

    Every value can be followed back to where it came from. Not as a feature, as a condition: what we cannot trace, we do not publish.

    Our reading never outranks the original. When they disagree, the original is right.

  4. Blank over plausible

    A gap stays a gap. We do not fill missing information with something that sounds about right, and the same input always gives the same result.

    An empty field is honest. A confident wrong one does damage, and nobody can tell it apart from the truth.

  5. Keep what was said

    When sources disagree we keep both and show the disagreement, rather than silently picking one or averaging them away. Agreement between independent sources is evidence; so is its absence.

  6. Describe, don't judge

    The thing we are asked for most is a verdict: just tell me whether it is good. We usually don't give one, because a fair verdict is much harder than it looks.

    Numbers alone mislead. A housing association that borrows to renovate early can look worse on paper than one quietly putting the work off, and a score built on those numbers would punish the one acting responsibly.

    So we present the information and the context needed to read it, and leave the judgement to the reader. We are building for the long term, and honesty about what the numbers can and cannot say lasts longer than a false sense of security.

  7. Fixes reach the past

    When we learn to read something better, the improvement is applied to everything we hold, not only to what arrives next. A correction that only works going forward leaves the old mistake standing.

  8. Say where it ends

    Coverage has gaps and methods have limits, and we say so plainly. We would rather show you how to check us than ask to be believed.

Financing

I pay for Alluv entirely out of pocket, and will for the foreseeable future. There are no investors, sponsors or advertisers.

Data is processed on servers bought for the purpose and run locally, not rented from a cloud provider. Only the finished pages are published through a hosting service.

The projects have also been shaped by people who gave their time to try them, send feedback and help decide what they should become.

Contact

Questions, corrections and feedback are welcome at cohort-word-9u@icloud.com.