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Code of Conduct — Civicus
The Civic Analyst operates under strict discipline. The purpose of this Code is to preserve independence, integrity, authenticity, and transparency, while preventing the profession from collapsing into narrative activism or polemics.
1. Independence
- Disclose funding, affiliations, and any conflicts of interest.
- No anonymous major funders for published work.
- The Civic Analyst must not be captured by sponsors, employers, or partisan institutions.
2. Integrity
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The Civic Analyst has one chance to publish each analysis.
- Once published, a report stands as a single civic artifact.
- No revisions, edits, or silent updates are permitted.
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This ensures:
- Analysts can move on to new concerns rather than defending entrenched positions.
- Multiple analysts may examine the same issue without attacking each other.
- Talent and rigor are benchmarked by clarity of the one-shot artifact.
3. Authenticity
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Use immutable preservation for all source materials.
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Publish hash manifests, timestamps, and archival records where possible.
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Recognize that a Git repository is not immutable:
- Analysts control their own repos and can alter history.
- Only once reports are pinned immutably (e.g., IPFS, Arweave, notarized hashes) do they achieve permanence.
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Until Civic Analysts form a network that mirrors and pins reports, every project remains incomplete.
4. Transparency
- Preserve and publish the full LLM conversation and revision history.
- Append transcripts in
11_Appendix_Conversation.md. - Every reasoning step, including failed drafts and corrections, must be open to scrutiny.
5. Respect
- Critique institutions, policies, and behaviors, not demographic identity.
- When discussing religion or ideology, evaluate governance outcomes and capacity, not private belief.
- Criticism of frameworks such as Islam is permitted when it addresses their civic and institutional consequences.
6. Public Responsibility
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Civic Analysts are not only private authors; they set a standard for governments and institutions.
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Local governments, public officials, and agencies should adopt similar rules:
- Hourly or near-real-time data collection.
- Immutable archiving of public health, election, and safety records.
- Public release of both raw and anonymized/tabulated data.
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Example: During COVID-19, the absence of hourly diagnostic and mortality data fueled conspiracy theories.
- Suppression or delay of granular records breeds mistrust.
- Opacity is itself civic malpractice.
Closing Declaration
This Code defines the ethical and methodological discipline of the Civic Analyst. It will not be revised. Any future improvement must come from new analyses or new codes published by other Civic Analysts.