Guidance for reading the dataset, including record status, verification limits, implementation, durability, reversal, and source trail.
The dataset is most useful when each row is read with its status, source, date, category, and location. These notes explain what the current record can and cannot show.
D4SC treats a public action as a dated, sourced event. A vote, renamed building, removed monument, fund, policy, or public statement records what an institution did at a point in time.
The current dataset does not automatically show whether an action was sustained, implemented, reversed, or quietly discontinued. That would require follow-up fields and updated source review.
Some records document statements or pledges. Others document formal votes, budget decisions, policy changes, removals, or renamed institutions. These should be read as different kinds of evidence.
Many records are tied to local institutions: school boards, cities, counties, universities, streets, buildings, and public monuments. The map should be read as a guide to where records are geocoded, not as a complete measure of activity.
A verified action, a pending public record, and a context source should not be flattened into the same claim. The public table keeps status visible because researchers need to know whether a row documents an action, a proposed action, a surrounding condition, or a source that still needs review.
A follow-up layer should ask whether a policy still exists, whether a renamed institution kept the name, whether funding was disbursed, whether an office was dissolved, and whether a symbolic action was later changed.
If a later source shows that a verified action was reversed or modified, the reversal should be recorded as a linked update rather than a replacement for the original row.
If a commitment disappears from websites, budgets, staffing charts, dashboards, or annual reports, that absence should be documented with dates, reviewed sources, and a clear confidence level.
V2 should connect each verified action to later evidence. This would let readers distinguish actions that endured from actions that were symbolic, stalled, renamed, defunded, legally constrained, or reversed.
The first approved action already in D4SC.
Evidence that the action was carried out, funded, staffed, or formalized.
Active, completed, stalled, rebranded, defunded, reversed, or unknown.
Board vote, legislation, litigation, leadership change, budget decision, or public backlash.
The best sourced description of where the commitment stands now.
Links to the verified record, later source, review notes, and date checked.