Keep the public record public.
Watermark exists so that the public record behind a public decision stays public — readable, citable, and checkable by anyone, for as long as the decision matters.
When a data-center campus, a permit, or a spending line reshapes a place, the documents that authorize it already exist. They're just scattered across agencies, buried in degraded scans, and effectively unreadable — public in name, private in practice.
Our mission is to turn that scattered record into one anyone can follow: read from the source, said plainly, and linked back so the reader can check it. Not a verdict, not an argument to be trusted — a record to be verified. We build it so the people a decision lands on can hold it to account with the same documents that authorized it.
The mission is only as good as the discipline behind it. These are the standing commitments the rest of the site is held to — the same ones asserted across the record itself.
- Provenance-first
Every figure carries its source and an evidence tag. Inference is labelled as inference, never dressed as fact; what's withheld is marked, not hidden. You never have to take our word over the record's.
- Static & durable
The record has to outlast the news cycle. Every page is static, reads with JavaScript off, and stays checkable against its cited source — built to still be here when the decision it documents still matters.
- Correctable
A public record earns trust by being fixable in the open. Every record links to a correction, and corrections are published with a provenance note rather than quietly applied.
- No trackers, no accounts
Reading the record costs nothing and asks nothing. No accounts, no trackers, no paywalls, no data sales — the incentive is to keep the record honest, not to monetize the reader.