How it works

Moving in

The first thing Baseline does is read the website you already have and rebuild it. Not a template with your seal dropped in the corner. Your departments, your boards, your pages, turned into real content.

That happens before you have committed to anything, because you ought to be able to judge a platform by looking at your own town on it. It also means the hard part of switching, the thing that keeps towns on software they dislike for nine years, is our problem instead of yours.

One honest caveat: this does not work everywhere yet. Some hosts block us outright and some sites need hands. If yours is one of them we will tell you before you sign, not after.

The daily loop

Short on purpose. Something arrives, the software drafts it, a person approves, it is up.

1. Something arrives

   A document from a board. An email somebody forwarded you. A date. One sentence typed into a box. Whatever you were going to post anyway, in whatever state it turned up in.

2. It works out what that is

   Which board, what date, and what else it means. Usually a document implies two or three other things: a calendar entry, a notice on the front page, a page that is now out of date.

3. It writes the lot

   The page, the headings, the summary, the photo descriptions, the translations. If the document is a scan it reads that first, because a picture of a page is no use to anyone.

4. You get one screen

   The draft, what changed, which bits the software wrote, and a button. Approve it, or send it back with a note.

5. It goes up, and so does the original

   People and search engines get the readable page. Where it came from a document, the original file stays attached, because that is the copy your attorney cares about.

Under five minutes, no training, and never an empty editor. That is what we are aiming at.

Shaping it to your town

Two towns twenty miles apart do not have the same boards, the same rules about who signs off, or the same idea of who is allowed to publish. None of that should require a custom build.

• Who approves what
  One reviewer, or the Clerk then the Administrator then the board. Different things can take different routes.
• Who can do what
  A department secretary should be able to post their own board's minutes without being handed the keys to the whole site.
• What your town is made of
  Your boards, offices and committees, named the way you name them.
• How it looks
  Your colors, within limits that keep it readable. It works in light and dark because we tested both.

What residents get

Public pages carry no JavaScript and are served ready-made. That buys quite a lot at once. It is fast on a bad rural connection, there is no cookie banner to click through, there is nothing to go down at the weekend, and it costs almost nothing to serve. It also removes most of the places accessibility bugs like to live.

• Search that looks inside documents
  People want what the minutes said, not the name of the file. No town site we looked at does this.
• Every document readable as a page
  With the original still there underneath for anyone who needs it.
• Translation
  Done automatically, and if somebody corrects it by hand that correction sticks.

What gets written down

Software that writes things on your behalf owes you an account of what it did.

• Who wrote what. Each piece of a page knows whether a person wrote it, the software drafted it, or a person edited a draft.
• A history you cannot quietly edit. Who changed what, when, and who approved it. Exportable when somebody files a records request.
• How much came from the machine. We work it out per page, and you can publish that if you want to.
• Everything, if you leave. All of it, history included.

See it on your own town

Request a demo