Charter

About the Project

Most legal systems exist as unstructured text—documents optimized for print, not computation. Municipal ordinances, bylaws, and community rules sit in PDF repositories where they can be read but not queried, tested, or validated. When a citizen asks "can I do this?", the answer requires parsing dozens of cross-referenced documents, understanding implicit hierarchies, and interpreting ambiguous language. When a city council drafts new rules, there's no systematic way to check for conflicts with existing law. Small organizations—co-ops, neighborhood associations, community land trusts—face even steeper barriers: they need governance infrastructure but lack the resources to hire attorneys for every decision.

Charter transforms legal text into structured, machine-readable rules that can be queried, validated, and executed. The system combines a JSON-based schema for ordinances with a rules engine for deterministic checks and LLM-based reasoning for interpretation. A city ordinance about fence heights becomes executable code that can instantly tell a resident whether their proposal complies. A housing co-op's guest policy becomes queryable logic that members can test before taking action. The platform uses vector embeddings for semantic search, finding relevant rules even when terminology differs. AI assists in extracting structure from existing legal documents, converting decades of municipal codes into machine-readable format, and validating new ordinances for conflicts before adoption.

The architecture is designed for scale-down, not scale-up. Core functionality works offline using SQLite and local files. Rule definitions are version-controlled like software, with changes tracked through git-style commits. Communities can fork templates—starting with proven governance patterns for housing co-ops, neighborhood associations, or small municipalities—and customize them through a structured editor rather than hiring attorneys to draft from scratch. The same infrastructure serves a 5,000-person town, a 50-member cooperative, or a neighborhood deciding how to share a community garden. This is foundational infrastructure for self-governance: making the rules that shape our lives both understandable and executable.