1 Stage
Intake
SLA: Open Call: 6-8 weeks pre-Congress
Auto: Confirmation email · Slack ping · NLP auto-tag
The architecture
The directory is one screen of a system.
Priority candidates flow in. The deliberation pipeline runs. Tagged community uses come back from the field. The 2027 Congress is built on top of the evidence the 2026 directory generates. This page shows the whole machine.
The deliberation pipeline
From 140 to 10, on purpose.
The Congress methodology is a 7-stage funnel. Open Call collects candidates. Affinity clustering compresses. Strategic Communication coding tests each cluster against Value, Barrier, Action, Vision. The Joy Filter rejects what won't make anyone want to wake up tomorrow. The room votes. Top ten publish. And then the system inverts: tagged community uses flow back in, becoming the source material for 2027.
140
Candidates
submitted via Open Call
30
Clusters
after affinity grouping + coding
Stages 1-2: Intake + Clustering
Stages 3-5: Coding + Joy Filter + Vote
Stage 6: Publish
2 Stage
Affinity Clustering
SLA: 1 week pre-Congress
Auto: Embedding similarity suggests groupings
3 Stage
Strategic Coding
SLA: Day 1 of Congress
Auto: Length validators + missing-dimension warnings
4 Stage
Joy Filter
SLA: Day 2 morning
Auto: No automation. The human gate.
5 Stage
Vote
SLA: Day 2 afternoon
Auto: Live tally + ranked-choice
6 Stage
Publish
SLA: Day 3 of Congress
Auto: Slug generation · static rebuild · email submitter
7 Stage
Track Uses
SLA: Continuous, between Congresses
Auto: Verify → publish to /uses · feed 2027 Open Call
Data model
What the schema actually is.
The proposal recommended Airtable + Softr. Here is the schema that lives in your git repo instead. Three tables do most of the work. Phase 2 graduates from a TypeScript module to D1, same shape.
Priority
The 10 published priorities. Static for the Congress cycle.
- id · uuid
- slug · text
- title · text
- themes[] · enum
- questions[] · enum
- status · enum
- value · text
- barrier · text
- action · text
- vision · text
- scales.local · text
- scales.national · text
- scales.global · text
PriorityCandidate
Submissions from /submit. Pipeline workhorse.
- id · uuid
- submittedAt · timestamp
- submitterEmail · email
- submitterCommunity · text
- value · text
- barrier · text
- action · text
- vision · text
- pipelineStage · enum (intake → published)
- clusterId · uuid?
- nlpSuggestedThemes[] · enum
CommunityUse
Tagged uses of priorities in real-world advocacy. The OUT-flow.
- id · uuid
- priorityId · string (P01-P10)
- useType · enum (deputation · sermon · curriculum · op-ed · proposal)
- userCommunity · text
- geography · text
- useTitle · text
- useUrl · url
- useExcerpt · text
- dimensionsCited[] · enum
- consentToPublish · bool
- verifiedBy · uuid?
Plus
- · DeliberationCluster (affinity grouping during Congress)
- · Favorite (per-attendee, localStorage Phase 1, KV Phase 2)
- · SubmissionEvent (audit trail, every state change)
- · TagEvent (provenance, human vs NLP)
- · Vote (Pol.is-style ranked-choice signal stream)
Why this beats Softr + Airtable
- · Schema lives in your git repo, not behind two SaaS logins
- · Phase 2 D1 stays $5/mo to ~5GB; Airtable Plus is $20/seat/mo
- · No template constraints (Softr's directory layouts fence in your visual identity)
- · Workers + KV gives you real custom interactions, not Softr's component library
- · Open data API at Phase 3 - academic research, journalism, partner orgs read directly
Automation
When X happens, Y fires.
The system is opinionated about what triggers what. Submissions confirm themselves. The deliberation team gets pinged on Slack. Tagged uses route to verification. Quarterly digests pull from /uses to feed the next Congress. Six rules cover most of it. Phase 3 adds NLP enrichment and email sequences.
PriorityCandidate.submitted
Resend confirmation email + Slack ping deliberation channel + Workers AI theme classification
PriorityCandidate.stage = published
Email submitter "your candidate is now Priority P0X" + auto-generate canonical URL + social card
CommunityUse.submitted
Slack ping verification team + auto-tag NLP + queue for 7-day verification SLA
CommunityUse.verified
Auto-publish to /uses + email reporter + add to quarterly digest pipeline
PriorityCandidate untouched > 7 days
Nudge deliberation team via Slack + flag for review
CommunityUse weekly sweep
Anonymized aggregate report → 2027 Congress Open Call material
The feedback loop
Why this is movement infrastructure, not a brochure.
A Congress organizer in Asheville quotes Priority 4 in a city council deputation on stormwater. They tag the use at /uses. Their deputation gets verified within 7 days, joins the public archive, and gets routed into the quarterly digest.
A teacher in New Mexico builds a 4-week unit on Priority 10. They tag it. Their curriculum becomes a reference for the next teacher. The Indigenous Education Institute sees the pattern in three districts and writes a grant.
By 2027, the Open Call goes live with one specific change: the most-used priorities have visible evidence behind them. The next Congress doesn’t restart from zero. It builds on top of every council deputation, every sermon, every classroom adaptation that the directory captured between 2026 and 2027.
That is the difference between a deliberation report and movement infrastructure.
Roadmap
Three phases. Built so each one stands alone.
Phase 1 ships in this Upwork demo. Phase 2 is the post-disco build that graduates to a real CRM. Phase 3 is the compounding layer that makes 2027 better than 2026 by default.
01 Phase
Demo
This deploy
Cost
$0/mo
Stack
Static Astro + localStorage + mailto:
Deliverable
Working preview, all 8 routes, mock dashboard
02 Phase
Production CRM
Weeks 2-4 post-disco
Cost
$25-45/mo
Stack
Astro + CF Workers + D1 + Resend + Cloudflare Access
Deliverable
Real submissions, verified uses, Access-gated admin
03 Phase
Compounding
Month 2+
Cost
$80-150/mo
Stack
Above + Workers AI + PostHog + email sequences
Deliverable
Self-improving system, quarterly digests, open data API
Phase 1 mock
See the deliberation pipeline as a kanban board.
The /admin route is a static preview of what Phase 2 ships as a real Cloudflare Access-gated dashboard. It shows the Intake → Cluster → Coding → Joy Filter → Vote → Publish pipeline with sample candidates in each column.
The system needs your candidate.
Open Call for the 2027 Congress runs continuously. Submit a priority your community has deliberated. Tag a community use. Both feed the next round.