The Record Standard

Why a Standard

Field Assembly publishes reference works about the rules institutions publish about themselves. A work like that is only as good as its discipline, and discipline claimed is worth less than discipline you can check. This page states the commitments every Field Assembly work is kept to, so that a reader, an advocate, or an opposing party can audit them rather than take them on trust.

These commitments existed as working rules inside each project before they were written down here. This page codifies them; it does not invent them.

1. What This Governs

Every reference work that carries the line "a Field Assembly record, kept to the published record standard" is governed by this document: what its pages may state, how its sources are captured and kept, and how its history can be verified. Each work also publishes its own dates, reviewer status, and change log on its own pages; where a page has not yet had its human review, the page says so.

2. First-Party Sources Only

Every fact on a page traces to what the institution itself published: its own pages, its own documents, its own dates. Third-party guides, news coverage, and general knowledge are never sources, never fill a gap, and never confirm anything, even when they are certainly right. Where two of an institution's own sources disagree, both are quoted and the disagreement is recorded; nothing is reconciled on the institution's behalf.

3. Verbatim, Verified Mechanically

Quotations are exact, artifacts included. Every source is captured in full into a retained packet before a page quotes it, and a checker proves, character for character, that every quotation on a published page is a contiguous substring of its captured source; that every phone number, email address, and external hostname on the page appears in the captured sources; and that advisory language appears nowhere outside quotation. A page that fails the checker is not published. When a check fails, the page is fixed; the packet is never padded to make a fact pass.

4. Two Dates on Everything

Every source carries the date the institution gave it (or the recorded fact that it published none) and the date it was retrieved. Every page states when its sources were last checked, and re-verification runs on a stated cadence. A stale statement is quoted with its date and called historical; silence since is never treated as confirmation.

5. Absence Is a Finding

Where an institution publishes nothing on a question, the page says so and names what was searched. An absence stated at the scope actually searched is information a reader can act on; an absence left blank is a reader guessing; an absence papered over with material from another state, another institution, or general knowledge is a fabrication. The works record what institutions fail to say with the same care they record what institutions say.

6. Nothing Is Destroyed

Captures are kept. When a re-verification pass finds a source changed, the new capture is retained beside the old one, and the record of every pass (what was checked, when, with what result) is kept separately from the captures themselves. The history of what an institution's pages said, including versions the institution has since replaced, stays queryable. Nothing in a capture store is ever edited; mistakes are superseded by later captures, on the record.

7. Dates You Can Prove

A capture date asserted by the person who holds the capture proves little. So each work's capture corpus is hashed into dated manifests joined in an append-only chain, and each chain entry is timestamped by parties outside Field Assembly's control: cryptographic timestamp tokens from independent authorities, plus a proof anchored in the Bitcoin blockchain. Altering any past capture or manifest breaks every later link.

The consequence is checkable by anyone: that a given capture existed, in exactly its current form, no later than a given date, can be verified with standard tools by someone who trusts neither Field Assembly nor any single timestamp provider. Each work's repository documents the verification steps.

8. The Record Is Free

The record itself (the pages, the quoted sources, the change logs, the capture history) is free and complete, with no accounts, no intake, and no analytics. If Field Assembly ever offers paid services on top of these works, payment attaches to formalization, such as certifying a capture for a proceeding, and never to access. No part of the record sits behind a fee, and no reader is profiled for having read it.

9. Corrections on the Record

Errors are corrected in each page's change log, dated, with the wrong version acknowledged rather than silently replaced. Corrections go to [email protected]. The works are independent of every institution they document, of detector and software vendors, and of law firms; each page states the independence relevant to its own subject.

10. What the Standard Does Not Claim

The works present potentially relevant official sources. They never determine which rule governs a situation, never calculate deadlines, never recommend arguments, never predict outcomes, and never give legal advice. What any source means for a particular case is for the institution and its processes to determine.

Field Assembly is also not a web archive, and makes no claim of breadth beyond each work's stated scope. It is not a capture service that can be hired after the fact; a record either was being kept when the moment passed or it was not. And it is not a monitoring product; the works exist for the reader in the middle of something, and for the later moment when what a page said, on a date, has to be shown.

11. Changes to This Standard

This standard is versioned and dated, and its own history is kept to its own rules: each version is retained, and changes are listed here with their dates. Version 1.0, August 28, 2026 — first publication, codifying the working rules of Rules & Record, Gathered Work, and Board & Border.