From Public Records to Public Knowledge

Public records are everywhere.

Audits. Contracts. Meeting agendas. Minutes. Financial reports. Board packets. Code-enforcement records. Procurement documents. Emails. Reports from inspectors, auditors, comptrollers, and public agencies.

The problem is not always access.

The problem is usability.

A document can be technically public and still be extremely difficult to find, search, connect to other records, or understand in context.

That is the problem we are building DoTheTell to address.

The first step: evidence-backed investigations

DoTheTell began as an investigative public-records platform.

Users can bring records into an investigation, search across them, ask questions, create findings, and trace important conclusions back to their supporting evidence.

Gwen, DoTheTell’s investigative AI, is designed around the same principle: answers should be grounded in records, and the source of a claim should remain visible.

That creates a useful private investigative workspace.

But there is a larger opportunity.

Public records should be reusable knowledge

Many of the documents that matter most are already public.

Government agencies publish internal audits, annual financial reports, bond disclosures, board agendas, meeting minutes, procurement records, and other important material every day.

Yet most of those records remain isolated in separate websites, PDFs, archives, and meeting systems.

A person investigating a contract may never know that the same vendor appeared in an audit.

Someone reviewing a development project may not know that it was discussed months earlier at a public meeting.

A journalist may have a set of records from a request without realizing that another public report already contains relevant context.

We want DoTheTell to help bridge that gap.

The Public Workspace

We are building a Public Workspace alongside private investigative workspaces.

Eligible records can be intentionally made public while preserving information about where they came from, including source, jurisdiction, document type, publication date, and other provenance.

Private records remain private by default.

The purpose is not to blur the boundary between public and private information.

It is to create a shared layer of public knowledge that can be searched and reused.

Gwen can help find what you did not know to look for

The most interesting part of this architecture is discovery.

A user should not need to know that a particular audit, financial report, or board packet exists before it can become useful.

As the Public Workspace grows, Gwen can identify potentially relevant public records while someone is working on an investigation.

For example:

A user reviewing a county contract might be told that an internal audit discusses the same vendor.

Someone investigating a public project might be alerted that the project appeared in a Board of County Commissioners meeting packet.

A financial investigation might surface a related annual report or bond disclosure.

Those public records are not automatically treated as evidence in the investigation.

The user decides whether to bring them in.

That distinction matters.

Discovery and evidence are not the same thing.

A government-facing opportunity

This also creates a different kind of product opportunity.

Governments already spend significant resources publishing public information.

But publishing a PDF is not the same as making the information easy for the public to use.

A public-facing DoTheTell workspace could help clerks, boards, auditors, comptrollers, and other agencies make official information easier to search, understand, and connect.

Examples could include:

• internal audit reports
• ACFRs and other financial reports
• revenue and bond reports
• commission agendas and minutes
• meeting packets
• procurement documents
• contracts
• code-enforcement board materials
• other official publications

We are beginning with the infrastructure needed to ingest and organize these kinds of records, with Orange County, Florida being used as an initial proof-of-concept source.

The broader idea

The long-term idea is simple:

Public records should not just be available.

They should be discoverable.

They should be searchable.

They should be connected.

And when someone makes a claim based on them, the evidence should still be traceable.

That is where we see DoTheTell going next: from an investigative records workspace toward a broader public-records intelligence layer.

Turn public records into evidence-backed intelligence.

Explore public records analysis, investigative document analysis, and more research guides.