An Open Standard for Showing
the Public Its Own Money
and What It Buys.
Updated Oct 10
The Honesty Framework is an open standard for public numbers. Each number wears one of four labels (FACT, CALC, SAMPLE or PENDING) and shows its source or its formula. Each judgment wears ANALYSIS and shows its test.
Transparency sites fail in one of two ways: they dump raw data nobody can read, or they polish a story nobody should trust. The standard is the discipline in between: seven rules that make a number worth believing. We proved it in production on Colorado's $49.6 billion Long Bill. We proved it past the budget too, on its schools, its cost of living, and the fiscal notes. These price each bill before it becomes law.
Every number is sourced or labeled. Every calculation shows its work. Every unknown says pending instead of pretending. Every mistake is corrected in one place, in public, forever. Never a guess dressed up as data.
Four labels on a number, one on a judgment. Three grades on its source.
Every number on a conforming page wears one of four labels. A judgment wears a fifth, ANALYSIS, and it never sits on a number. The label says how we know it, not who said it. A reader learns five words once and can then read any page built to this standard. Each label has a fixed address on this page, so a site that uses it can link to its definition from the number itself. Hover or tab to any chip on this page and the definition appears, with the version it comes from.
The labels: four for a number, one for a judgment
FACT Taken from an official record
The number is copied from a public record you can open, with the record named and the date we read it. Nothing about it is ours except the reading.
CALC Arithmetic on facts, with the formula shown
We did the math, and the math is printed next to the number: what went in, what was done to it, and where each input came from. A CALC you cannot check is not a CALC.
SAMPLE A placeholder or your own assumption, marked loudly
SAMPLE is one of two things. It is demonstration data, so you can see the shape of a page before a real feed exists. Or it is an assumption: a value that is yours, such as an input you typed. It is never mixed with real figures. A placeholder never stays once the real figures arrive. An assumption is yours, so no source will replace it.
PENDING Blank, on purpose, with the reason on file
The field is real and empty. Nobody has published the number, or we have not read the source yet. We leave it blank rather than guess. A blank has more than one cause, and the blanks section tells them apart.
ANALYSIS A judgment we made, with its test shown
Not a number. A classification, or a reading of what a number means. It appears only with the test it was made against and the evidence for each part of that test beside it. Where CALC shows its formula, ANALYSIS shows its test. It never sits on a figure, and never beside a named person or company without the test on the same card.
The grades: how good the source is
A Official record, current cycle
The publisher’s own document for the period in question, read directly.
B Official, but it may lag or need reconciling
An official record from an earlier cycle, an official body restating a figure it did not originate, or one that disagrees with a sibling document and is being reconciled in the open.
C An agency statement, a media report or an inference, still being verified
Something an agency said, a news report, or something we inferred, that no primary record has yet confirmed. It is shown as C until one does, and a C-graded figure is excluded from every total.
Seven rules
Any site, in any state, on any subject of public record — a budget, a bill, a vote, a test score, a price — can adopt these. They are format-agnostic and party-agnostic — the framework doesn't care who's in office; it cares whether the reader can check.
Label every number by what it is
Every number wears FACT, CALC, SAMPLE or PENDING, and a judgment wears ANALYSIS. The four number labels and ANALYSIS are defined above. Each has its own address, so a page can link a label straight to what it means.
Grade every source, and archive it
A official record, current cycle · B official, may lag or need reconciliation · C agency statement or inference, still verifying. We save every cited document as a fixed copy on the day we cite it. A dead link then never breaks a citation, and "what did this say on date X" stays answerable.
Compute once, display everywhere
Every derived figure is calculated a single time, in a logic tier at ingestion — versioned, graded, persisted — and every surface merely reads it. No app recomputes a dollar on request.
Correct in public, permanently
A change to a published figure is never silent. We log the date, the subject, the value before and after, and the reason. That includes the errors that were ours. The corrections log is the site's audit opinion, written by itself.
Show what's missing and what was refused
The waitlist is part of the story: requests the state declined, projects halted mid-stream, money that lives outside the books entirely. And where data simply isn't published, the site says so — a blank labeled PENDING beats an estimate of ours every time. A forecast the publisher made and published is a different thing, and there is a rule for that too.
Context or it doesn't ship
No figure about a person, office, or program appears without its denominator and baseline: earlier years, earlier administrations, peers. We show associations as associations. We never assert a cause from a correlation. The same standard applies to every officeholder of every party.
Give the subject a voice — and the reader one too
Any office named on a page has a standing right-of-response, displayed beside the data with its status. And the reader isn't an audience: ratings, comments, and follow-ups flow back, moderated and honestly labeled, so transparency runs in both directions.
Five ways to mark an absence
A blank field is a claim, so it has to say what kind of blank it is. These five cover every empty space on a page built to this standard. They do not mean the same thing, and if you run them together the site tells its own kind of lie.
The first two say nobody has published the figure. The third says the figure cannot exist at this level at all, so no amount of work closes it. The fourth says we have it and are not showing it — a different admission, and the one we would most like to hide. The fifth is the mark a page draws in the space where the figure would have been.
PENDING A blank with its reason on file
The field stays empty and the record behind it names the cause. Nobody publishes the number, or we have not read the source yet, or the publisher held it back. Pending means work could close the gap.
NOT PUBLISHED The publisher could report it and does not
The plainest kind of pending. Someone holds this figure and reports none of it, so the field stays blank. We never fill it with an estimate. A plausible unsourced number is worse than an empty field, because a reader cannot tell it from a real one.
NOT ELIGIBLE The figure cannot exist at this level
No work closes this one, so pending would promise something nobody can deliver. Take the vehicle-theft rank, which puts the 51 state jurisdictions in order. A city is not one of them, so it holds no place in that order and has no rank to report. Rebase the rank onto a chosen group of peers and you get a different measure under the same name.
WITHHELD We have it and are not showing it
The other four are about a figure nobody has. This one is about a record we hold. Somewhere on this site a real, sourced detail is deliberately not on the page. The chip sits where it would have been, with the reason beside it.
Since August 2026 that is the vendor names on Colorado's project ledger. The contract value, what has been paid so far and the confidence grade all publish exactly as before. The name of the company, the record link that names it and the campaign-finance search are held back while counsel is engaged.
A blank would have been the easier thing to ship and it would have been a lie. It reads as a figure we could not find, and this is a figure we found. So the site says so, and says who decided: withholding is our choice, not the publisher's, and it is reversible in a single deploy. When it is reversed, the corrections log will carry that too.
The tiled question marks
Where a bar or a figure belongs, we draw a block of watermarked question marks. An empty track reads as a page that failed to load. The question marks read as the finding: nobody published this. The mark is only ever for a figure someone could publish and has not. It never sits on a NOT ELIGIBLE slot, because that would say a figure exists and someone keeps it back.
What it looks like on a page. This is the dashboard’s own device, not a picture of it. It drifts the same way, and it holds still for readers who prefer reduced motion.
Ten words for what changed
Every entry in the corrections log carries one word. The word says what kind of change it was. A wrong number put right, a publisher reissuing its own figure, and wording that moved no number are three different admissions. Ten words cover every change this site logs. A badge on the log links straight to the one it wears.
clarified
No figure changed. The wording did, and it now says what it always meant.
corrected
We published something that was wrong. The page now shows what is right.
disclosed
Nothing was wrong. We began a new practice, and we say so here.
fixed
Something on the page was broken. We repaired it, and no figure changed.
open
We know about a discrepancy here and have not resolved it. We still show the figure, and we flag it.
refreshed
The publisher issued a new figure. We read it and put the new one on the page.
regraded
The number did not move. The grade we give the source behind it did.
restated
The publisher issued the same quantity again in a different form. What it counts did not change.
revised
A figure on the page moved, and the move was not our mistake.
withdrawn
A figure or a claim came down, and nothing took its place. Where it stood is now blank.
When the number is a forecast, and whose forecast it is
The rule above says a blank beats an estimate. That rule is about our estimates and it does not bend. This one is about the publisher's. Governments forecast their own finances in public, and a reader is entitled to see what their own state expects.
We never invent a figure nobody published
Where a number is not published, the field stays blank and says why. We do not model it, scale it up from a neighbor, or carry a trend forward into a year nobody has reported. A plausible unsourced number is worse than an empty field, because a reader cannot tell it from a real one. One kind of number is ours, and it wears its own word. A FLOOR is a deliberate under-estimate of an amount that turns on something only you know. It says what it assumed, and it is never added to a traced dollar.
A publisher's forecast is itself a published record
When a state forecasts its own revenue and prints the figure, that forecast has an author, a date and a document behind it. Quoting it is not the same act as inventing one. So a forecast can appear here — as the publisher's, with their name on it, and never as ours.
It says it is a forecast everywhere it appears
Not once at the top of a page. The word travels with the figure. You see it in the table cell, under the bar, in the chart's own readout, and in the description a screen reader hears. The bar is drawn as an outline where a settled figure is filled, so a reader who sees only the picture still sees the difference.
A forecast and a settled figure are never added together
A total mixing the two would be neither one thing nor the other. They sit side by side, and each keeps its own basis. This is the same refusal this site makes about two publishers' figures, or two years measured different ways.
A forecast can also be overtaken. When the certified figure arrives and differs from it, that is a change to a published number. It goes in the corrections log like any other.
How far your dollar can be followed
The four number labels above say how we know a number. The four words below grade a dollar. A household in Colorado pays six to ten governments at once. The honest question is not only whether each number is right. It is how far each dollar you paid can be followed, from the payment to the thing it bought. Every dollar a page follows wears one of these four words, and the page says which.
TRACED Followed to the government that got it
We followed this dollar by a rule written in law, or by a bill you already hold. The tax on a car registration is set by statute (C.R.S. 42-3-106 and 42-3-107), and the same statute, at 42-3-107(24), says how the county splits it. The split goes to the governments that tax your address, in proportion to the property tax dollars each levied the year before. A property tax bill lists every government by name. Nothing is estimated.
FLOOR We know who gets it, and we estimate how much, low
The list of governments is exact. The amount is not, because it depends on something only you know, like what you spend in a year. So we estimate low on purpose, we say what we assumed, and we call the result a floor. A floor is never added to a traced dollar.
NOT MEASURED Nobody measures it, and said so in writing
This word is never earned by silence. It is earned by a records request. The request asked for the record and, failing that, for whatever describes how the office tracks the subject. The answer came back in writing: nothing does. That answer is the source. It is dated and archived, and the refusal is published in the office’s own words.
What it looks like on one receipt. On Colorado Works Better, a car registration is built line by line from the state’s own fee schedule and the statutes behind it. The ownership tax, the largest line, is TRACED: statute sets the rate and statute sets the split. The road safety surcharge is TRACED to the county it landed in, because the Treasury publishes that distribution, and SHARED past it. The fees that fund the state’s newer transportation enterprises are SHARED until a request for their project-level spending comes back. If the answer is that nobody tracks it, that line becomes NOT MEASURED, with the letter beside it.
The four words add up to one sentence a page can print. Of the tax and fee dollars a household pays, this much can be traced and this much has a floor. This much is shared, and this much nobody measures. Each keeps its own basis, and none is rolled into another. The last share stays blank until the first written refusal is on file. Beside that sentence sits the list of choices that produce it, because each one is a decision somebody could reverse, not a law of nature.
Proven in production, not proposed on paper
We did not design the framework in the abstract. We took it out of a working system. Colorado Works Better applies all seven rules to the State of Colorado's FY 2026–27 budget. It also applies them to what sits past it: education outcomes, the cost of living, and the fiscal notes. These price each bill before it becomes law.
It carries a verified 50-project capital registry, a plain-English budget explorer, and a public corrections log. Every figure has a source grade. Its methodology documents the whole discipline in plain language.
Free to adopt. Certified when it counts.
The seven rules are an open standard and always will be. You can adopt them today, in any format, on any subject of public record, without asking anyone. A standard nobody can use freely is a standard nobody uses.
What is worth paying for is not the text. It is the mark: an independent review of what you publish against the seven rules and the five things a conforming site does. The review reads the site rather than asking it. It is renewed every year. A reader who does not know you can then still trust the numbers. That review is what we license.
Use the seven rules, the label taxonomy and the corrections-log pattern. No permission, no fee. Attribution required.
Independent conformance review against all seven rules, plus the right to display the Honesty Framework mark. Annual renewal, published findings.
We build it — ingestion, provenance grading, labels and the public surface — on your data, to the standard.
Workshops and editorial review for teams implementing the framework themselves, and for funders writing it into grant terms.
What a conforming site does
1. Labels every number with one of the four number labels, every judgment with ANALYSIS, and every followed dollar with one of the four words.
2. Links every label to its definition here. Every chip on this page already does: hover or tab to one. Each label has a fixed address here, such as #label-fact, and a conforming site links each chip it prints to that address. When a reader hovers or focuses the chip, the site shows the definition and the framework version it follows. That is how a reader on any site, ours or not, can check that a label means what this page says it means.
3. Prints its legend from the same source as its chips. The block that explains the labels and the chips on the numbers come from one definition, so the two cannot drift apart.
4. Keeps a public corrections log, in one place, that never deletes an entry.
5. Says which version it follows, in its footer or its methodology, so a reader knows which definitions apply.
Where Colorado Works Better stands, said here because this page is the wrong place to overstate it. It does all five today, and its footer names this framework. Its chips link to these addresses, and the hover on each is built from the same definition this page prints.
Who this is worth something to
Non-profits and NGOs. Every grant report is a claim about outcomes. Conformance turns “trust our impact numbers” into numbers checked against a public standard. The PENDING label also solves the reporting problem nobody talks about: what to do when you do not know yet.
Foundations and grantmakers. The same trade, with more reach. A funder can write conformance into its grant terms. It then gets one comparable format across a whole portfolio, instead of a hundred impact decks that do not line up. One adopter, many users.
Governments and agencies. States, counties, cities and special districts already publish. The framework makes what they publish credible, and gives procurement something specific to require.
Companies. Impact and sustainability disclosure is under pressure precisely because claims arrive without provenance. Separating fact from calculation from unknown is the discipline that regulators are converging on anyway.
Newsrooms, universities and research organizations. Provenance grading and a public corrections log are already professional norms — this makes them legible to readers rather than buried in a methods note.
The standard itself stays free under all of the above. Certification exists for one reason. A reader who has never heard of you needs a reason to believe your numbers.
Inquire about certification or licensing
Tell us what you publish and what you need it to prove. We will reply with whether certification fits, what it would involve, and what it would cost.