Satire · Methodology-ish
How the sausage gets scanned.
Four steps, zero sources, one very confident dashboard. This page describes a fictional product. The criticism is not fictional.
The pipeline
From public document to private alarm
Every step is automated except the outrage, which is crowdsourced.
Collect
We scrape board agendas, minutes, PDFs, and anything else that looks official. If a district posts it, we have it. If a district does not post it, we assume it exists anyway.
Score
A language model reads the text and assigns a threat score from 1 to 10. The model was trained on four million agendas and one very angry Facebook post.
Alert
Anything above a 6 becomes a push notification with a red header. Anything above an 8 becomes a fundraising email. A 10 becomes a press release.
Escalate
Your chapter forwards the alert to a group chat. The group chat forwards it to a larger group chat. Eventually someone attends a meeting.
Methodology
The score, explained
Our 1–10 scale is precise, scientific, and made up. It measures how concerned we believe you should be, based on how concerned we became while reading a summary of a document we did not read.
What the numbers mean
- 1–3: Routine governance. We do not alert you. We barely alert ourselves.
- 4–6: A word we flagged appears near a word we like. Monitor closely.
- 7: We are not sure what this means, but we are concerned about it.
- 8: We have emailed the board. We have not read the attachment.
- 9: We have emailed the board twice and CC’d a state representative.
- 10: The agenda contains the word “belonging.” Deploy the group chat.
Our accuracy
98.6%, measured against our own prior predictions. This is the most rigorous validation method available to an organization that has decided in advance that it is right.
“If the document turns out to be a fire drill schedule, we simply reclassify it as a warning sign about priorities.”
What we do not do
We do not call the district. We do not read the full document. We do not ask what the agenda item means. We do not wait for the meeting. We do not publish a correction. All four of those things would slow down the alert, and the alert is the product.
What this parodies
Real agenda-monitoring tools promise parents early warning about school board decisions. Early warning can be useful. But a score generated from keywords, delivered without context, and amplified by a national network is not information. It is a mood with a timestamp.
Ready to feel certain about something you haven’t read?
That is the entire onboarding process.