Work / WhatItMeans.org
WhatItMeans.org
Public documents explained in plain language, with a human review desk.
The situation
The official text of a ballot measure is accurate and nearly unreadable. The campaign flyer is readable and not accurate. Voters are left choosing between the two.
WhatItMeans.org starts from the official document and writes down what it actually means, with the source linked on every page and the people behind it named. Non-partisan, sourced, free.
What we built
- Projects: a set of related documents, such as every measure on the 2026 Colorado ballot.
- Two AIs read each document separately, and the site shows where their readings disagree. Where two careful readings come apart is usually where the thing is genuinely confusing.
- Who is behind it: who wrote it, who filed it, who is paying for the ads. Official summaries leave this out.
- A review desk: nothing publishes until a person has read the draft against the source.
- Reader accounts and donations, and a clean reading experience on a phone.
How it is built
An ingestion pipeline fetches the official document, two different language models produce independent explainers, a comparison step highlights their disagreements, and an editor works through a review queue before anything is public.
For the engineer reading along: its own repository and application (it began inside Axis and was spun out), document fetch and text extraction, two model providers with structured outputs, a diff and disagreement step, an editorial workflow with states and an audit trail, static-fast public pages.
What it does today
The current project is the 2026 Colorado ballot, with 14 statewide measures explained ahead of election day, November 3, 2026. The pattern, AI drafting with named human review, is one we reuse in client work.
Running it
Its own deploy, monitored by Watchdog. Public pages are cached hard so an election-night spike costs nothing.
Have something that needs building, or running?
Tell us what you are trying to do. We reply within one business day, and the first conversation is free.