Briefing packets.

Design v0.1 · Draft · 2026-08-30 · Automated generation not yet shipped

The Shame Index measures a whole city. The Rapid Response Roll celebrates specific crews. But between those two, there’s a set of people who need Fault Line data pre-packaged: elected officials responsible for a district and local journalists writing about infrastructure. Instead of hoping they find our dashboards, we send them structured, methodology-linked packets on a fixed cadence. Council-member briefings monthly, press summaries on cluster threshold events.

1. Why automate briefings and press summaries

• Council staff already do this work manually, badly. Constituent-services staffers cobble together district-level infrastructure summaries from spreadsheets and their own memory when a council member has a meeting. Fault Line already has the underlying data; automating the packet gives council members a better version of what they’re already trying to make.
• Local journalists cover pre-packaged stories. Newsroom capacity is thin. A story that arrives with statistics, GPS-tagged photos, response-time comparisons, and a methodology link gets covered. A story that requires a reporter to build the analysis from scratch usually doesn’t. This is not gaming coverage — it’s reducing the friction from “there is a documented pattern” to “the public knows about it.”
• The buyer persona for the city dashboard is the recipient of the briefing. Council members and DPW directors who receive value from Fault Line-generated packets become internal champions for pilot-city adoption. This is the missing link between the /cities page and a signed pilot.

2. Two output types

3. Council-member district briefing — sample format

Below is an illustrative packet for a hypothetical councilor. Formatting shown as plain text for readability — delivered packet is a branded PDF plus a machine-readable JSON companion for staff who want to import into their own tools.

4. Press-ready cluster summary — sample format

Delivered when a cluster crosses a defined threshold. Designed to be usable by a reporter with no additional analysis work — headline, lede, numbers, GPS-tagged photo, methodology link, and a right-of-reply note from the responsible authority if one has been submitted.

5. Guardrails

1. No editorial embellishment. Packets contain structured data, methodology-linked numbers, and photographic evidence. They do not contain adjectives or characterization not directly supported by the data. “Elm St pothole cluster remains open at day 115” is a packet claim. “The city is dragging its feet” is not.
2. Not partisan. Council-member briefings are non-partisan by design and are provided to every council member of record regardless of party. Suppressing a briefing to a specific council member is a data-integrity failure and Fault Line will not do it.
3. Right-of-reply before press distribution. Every press-ready summary is shared with the responsible authority 24 hours before it goes to subscribed journalists. If the authority responds with material information, that response is appended before distribution.
4. No cherry-picking. Council briefings include both success stories and problem clusters. A packet that only includes the outperforming metrics is a marketing document, not accountability data. The methodology defines what qualifies for inclusion; individual staffers cannot omit items to make their district look better.
5. No paid placements. Same brand covenant as the Shame Index and Rapid Response Roll. Nobody buys inclusion in or exclusion from a Fault Line briefing.
6. Council members can add their own commentary. The delivered packet is a starting point. Council members and their staff can annotate, add context, and publish their own version — provided they don’t alter Fault Line’s methodology-cited numbers. The point is to give them structured raw material, not to constrain how they use it.

6. Subscription and distribution

For council members

Every council member of record for a jurisdiction Fault Line has data on receives a briefing at their official office address on the first of each month. There is no opt-in required; the briefings are a public service, delivered to a public official at a public email address. Council members can request additional formats, on-demand delivery, or briefing extensions (multi-district, historical trend) at no cost during the pilot period.

For local journalists

Reporters subscribe by providing a verifiable byline URL (any published article at a news outlet establishes eligibility) plus the jurisdiction(s) they cover. Verification is manual during pilot. Press-summary distribution is automatic once verified. Reporters can specify: (a) threshold triggers of interest (deadline exceeded, cluster size, equity flag), (b) delivery format (PDF, JSON, both), (c) embargo preferences (immediate vs. next-business-day).

For everyone else

All briefings that are distributed to any recipient are also published at fault-line.dev/briefings/<jurisdiction>/<date> with the same URL structure. There is no gated access — if a briefing exists, it’s public. This prevents any perception that Fault Line is selectively influencing coverage or providing preferential information to specific journalists or elected officials.

7. What still needs to happen before this ships

1. Council-district boundary dataset. Fault Line has census-tract boundaries via TIGER; council districts are city-specific and require per-city ingestion. Some cities publish these openly; some don’t. Pilot cities will provide theirs during onboarding.
2. Verified council-office address list. Each city publishes elected-official contact addresses somewhere; the ingestion is manual per city during pilot.
3. Journalist verification workflow. Manual during pilot; automatable later with byline verification services.
4. Packet generator. New service in the backend that takes (jurisdiction, district, date range) and produces the PDF + JSON. Data is already in Supabase; generator is new.
5. Right-of-reply infrastructure. A pre-distribution notification email to authority contact of record, with a 24-hour window and an append-response endpoint.

Full engineering scope in DEFERRED.md #27. Realistic path: council-member briefings ship first (simpler distribution model), press summaries follow once we have a pilot city and one local reporter willing to test the format.

8. Relationship to the rest of Fault Line

• Briefing content is derived entirely from data that already backs /methodology, /rapid-response, and /access-equity. Nothing new is being measured — the briefings are a distribution layer for what’s already computed.
• Every briefing links back to the underlying methodology page for full definitions and calculations.
• Press summaries include the statute citation from the versioned statute dataset with its verification-status footer.
• Council briefings surface the Rapid Response Roll listings for the district when applicable — celebrating fast responses is part of the same data flow, not a separate initiative.

Not legal advice. Briefing packets are structured summaries of Fault Line report data, published methodology, and cited statutes. Elected officials, journalists, and residents remain solely responsible for any decisions, coverage, or action taken based on packet content. Statutory citations in press summaries reflect the current version of Fault Line’s statute dataset, subject to the review status disclosed in each packet footer.