CIVIC SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE · MVP
Receipts
Don't post your opinion. Put a receipt on the table.
This is the social layer of the Loom concept: a civic network in which the primary object is a claim backed by material evidence. People do not build friend graphs. They encounter claims, corroborate them, challenge them, and leave a trace of what the evidence can actually establish.
The Receipt
A Receipt is not a post, vote, like, or reputation point. It is an input to the research record. Corroboration can strengthen verification, but promotion remains a separate Loom governance event.
The Contradiction Stream
City claim: “Water rates remained stable.” Supported
Neighbor receipts: Multiple households report substantially higher bills during the same period.
Current state: Contested · scope and causal relationship require investigation.
Your move: Add a document, challenge the scope, provide a counterexample, or mark that the experience does not match your own.
A disagreement is not automatically evidence that either side is wrong. The system's job is to expose the contradiction and preserve the evidence needed to resolve it.
The Alignment Web
Pseudonymous resident
Public-facing identity is a stable pseudonymous handle. Exact household location is not exposed in the social graph.
Shared evidence pattern
Connections emerge from overlapping receipts, contradictions, claim types, time periods, and research questions—not friend requests.
Claim Cluster
A group of materially related receipts can be assembled for joint evidence review. A cluster is not itself proof.
Evidence is the social action.
When three or more genuinely independent households provide materially relevant evidence, the system can flag the claim for cross-verification. That is a verification state—not an automatic declaration of a “Neighborhood Fact.”
Turn a verified record into an institutional question.
When a sufficiently verified neighborhood claim materially conflicts with an official claim, the system can assemble a Pressure Packet: the claim, scope, evidence identifiers, verification events, relevant official record, contradiction, and unresolved questions.
Four development steps
- The Drop: choose one tract and seed it with a small set of genuinely verified, anonymized founding receipts.
- The Match: compare new receipts by claim type, time overlap, geographic scope, and other explicit matching fields.
- The Review: allow corroboration and contradiction while preserving source independence and provenance.
- The Pressure: generate an inspectable packet when the evidence reaches the required verification state and a documented contradiction exists.
What has to be built
1 · Storage
Receipt objects need durable storage. A database is the straightforward MVP path; a Git-backed prototype is possible if every submission becomes a structured, reviewable artifact rather than an unvalidated file.
2 · Identity
Generate stable pseudonymous handles without publishing exact addresses. The identity layer must separate authentication from the public research record.
3 · Corroboration
Match receipts using explicit fields such as claim type, overlapping timeframe, geographic scope, and material similarity. Matching suggests a cluster; it does not establish truth.
4 · Loom integration
Receipts become research inputs. Evidence, observations, claims, verification events, contradictions, and promotions remain distinct objects with their own provenance.
The social mechanic cannot become a truth mechanic.
The network can make evidence easier to produce, discover, compare, and challenge. It cannot turn popularity into verification.
The social graph can increase the rate at which evidence appears. It must not lower the evidentiary standard for what Loom publishes as established.