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Public Decision Log

A public register of decisions — instantiates Transparency for Accountability

A durable, itemized public record of which decisions and actions were taken and when, each entry pinned to its authoritative source version.

A Public Decision Log is the durable, itemized record of which decisions and actions a body has taken — the running index that answers "what has been decided, and when?" Its distinguishing trait among these mechanisms is completeness and permanence over freshness or explanation: it is not the live status board and not the place reasons live, but the append-only ledger of outcomes, each entry pinned to the authoritative source it came from so an entry can't be quietly altered or an inconvenient decision omitted. Its accountability value is that the whole set of decisions is visible and fixed — you can see not just any one decision but the pattern, and notice what is missing.

Example

A private foundation that funds community projects publishes a decision log: every funding decision (approved, declined, deferred), the amount, the date, the applicant category, and a link to the minutes and reasons behind it. Because the index is complete, dated, and versioned, an outside observer can see patterns the foundation might prefer stayed diffuse — that one region is declined at twice the rate, say — and ask about them. Each entry links back to its source record and carries a version stamp, so a later edit shows as an edit rather than a silent rewrite.

How it works

The distinguishing discipline is scope plus provenance. First, an explicit definition of which decisions and actions are in scope for logging, so "we didn't log that one" isn't a quiet loophole; then each is entered as an itemized record with a stable ID, a timestamp, and a link to the authoritative source and version it reflects. The log is append-only: corrections are added as new versioned entries, never overwrites, so the log's own history is itself inspectable.

Tuning parameters

  • Scope of what's logged — which classes of decision are in scope. Broad scope closes gaps but raises volume and privacy load.
  • Entry granularity — one line per decision vs. richer records. Richer is more useful and heavier to maintain.
  • Provenance depth — link to source, or embed full version history. Deeper provenance resists tampering claims but costs plumbing.
  • Latency to post — how soon after a decision an entry appears. Sooner is more accountable; batching is cheaper.
  • Machine-readability — a human page vs. a structured export. Structured data enables outside analysis, and outside scrutiny.

When it helps, and when it misleads

Its strength is making the pattern of decisions visible and fixing the record so nothing can be quietly un-decided; a complete, dated index is what lets a reviewer or journalist spot the outlier and the omission.

Its failure mode is that a log can be technically complete and still uninformative — a wall of "Application #4471: denied" entries with no link to reasons or criteria discloses that decisions happened while disclosing nothing accountable about them. And scope is the soft spot: the decisions that never enter the log are invisible precisely because the log looks complete. The discipline is a published scope rule — what must be logged — and a link from every entry to its reasons and authority, so the index leads somewhere.[1]

How it implements the components

  • decision_and_action_scope — it defines and enumerates which decisions and actions are covered, and records each; the scope rule is part of the mechanism.
  • provenance_and_version_link — each entry is pinned to its authoritative source and version, and corrections append rather than overwrite, so the record resists silent alteration.

It does not record why each decision was made (the Reason-Giving Template), who was authorized to make it (Authority & Delegation Register), or the criteria it was judged against (the Rule & Criteria Register); the log indexes the decisions and links out to those.

Notes

The log's accountability is largely borrowed from what its entries link to. An index of decisions with no route to their reasons, authority, or criteria records that decisions occurred while disclosing nothing that could hold anyone to account — which is why the scope rule and the outbound links, not the entry count, are what make it more than a tally.

References

[1] Open-records and "sunshine" laws — freedom-of-information and open-meeting statutes — require public bodies to keep and disclose records of their decisions. The principle a decision log operationalizes is that the existence and set of decisions must be on the record, which is exactly what a selectively-kept log defeats. ↩