Unsearchable council recordsResidents can't find what their council decided
Local government publishes its decisions (planning, licensing, budgets, minutes) and publishing is where the obligation stops. They arrive as scanned documents with inconsistent names, in systems searchable only if you already know what you are looking for. A decision that changes a street is technically public and practically private.
Framed by Ainna's innovation team
Who lives with it
Residents and neighbourhood groups · local reporters · small developers and community organisations
Why now
Local newsrooms have continued to close in many markets, removing the layer that used to read these documents on everyone else's behalf.
Why it matters
The information is already public, already funded and already digital. Making it findable is a data problem rather than a political one, which is why it is tractable, and why it keeps falling between mandates.
On the Index
Framed by Ainna's innovation team from a condition most readers will recognise, so no source is claimed. Published in Edition 1.
Ainna frames what it reads; it does not report. Nothing on the Index comes from a user, and what you bring to Ainna is never published.
Benefits, banking, health records and school places are moving to interfaces that begin by asking you to prove who you are online. Hundreds of millions of people cannot prove who they are at all, and billions more have no digital means of doing it, so each service added to the digital channel quietly removes itself from the people who most need it, while the statistics record improved efficiency.
For whomPeople without foundational or digital ID · agencies moving services online · the frontline staff handling every exception by hand
Loss happens at the handovers: field to packer, packer to distributor, distributor to shelf. Every party measures only its own side of each one. So each set of numbers looks defensible while the total is enormous, and the interventions that would work are precisely the ones nobody can see, because they sit between two businesses rather than inside one.
For whomGrowers and packers · distributors and independent retailers · redistribution charities working the same corridors
Caring for an ageing parent means medications, appointments, home visits, bills and forms, shared between siblings in different cities and often different countries. It runs on a group chat, a shared folder and whoever remembers. Things fall through, one person quietly carries most of it, and the professionals involved each see a fragment of a picture nobody holds whole.
For whomAdult children caring for parents · home-care workers · family doctors seeing only their slice
