CivicIPFS is scoped to county and below: county offices, municipalities, townships, special districts, and the property and civic records residents actually depend on. It preserves and witnesses public records as text — not PDFs, not scans — so the underlying facts stay usable instead of locked inside a file.
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CivicIPFS is built around the county.
Not as a national archive, and not as a general-purpose file store. The county is where most public records become real for residents: property records, tax records, plats, liens, meeting minutes, ordinances, permits, zoning files, budgets, public-health notices, enforcement actions, election notices. Everything inside and below the county is in scope — municipalities, townships, library and park districts, fire and water districts, school and sanitary districts, and property-governance structures like HOAs.
Most IPFS pinning doesn't care what it's storing. It addresses bytes and moves on. That's useful, but it isn't enough for public records, where the point isn't just that a file survives — it's that the facts inside it stay reachable.
This is also why CivicIPFS restricts itself to text. County government increasingly publishes as PDF, and PDF is good at one thing in particular: hiding data. A table inside a scanned packet isn't usable public data, it's a picture of usable public data. CivicIPFS pins plain text, JSON, XML, and similar formats — not PDFs, scans, or other binary files. That's a real, enforced limit, not a future feature: content that isn't confirmed text gets rejected before it's ever pinned.
The reasoning behind that limit is twofold. It keeps legal responsibility for what's published with the people actually publishing it, not with the infrastructure underneath. And it deliberately leaves room for other services to handle binary records, archival scans, or large media — CivicIPFS isn't trying to be everywhere at once.
The Steward/Witness model fits the same county-records use case directly. A Steward publishes a record and stands behind it. A Witness preserves a copy without being presumed to endorse it — infrastructure, not editorial judgment. That separation matters for public records specifically: a county clerk's office, a township board, or a resident publishing a property dispute shouldn't have their record's survival depend on a single point of failure, and the people storing it shouldn't be mistaken for the people who wrote it.
HOA Diagnostics is one project built on top of this layer — using plats, liens, covenants, tax records, and municipal records that CivicIPFS can help preserve. It isn't the whole project; it's one application of it.
Where this goes next: the structured extraction described above — pulling tables and facts back out of source documents and linking them to their origin — is a real direction for this work, but it isn't built yet and isn't part of the current specification. Today, CivicIPFS's job is narrower and more concrete: preserve text-based public records, witness them independently, and keep that chain verifiable. Getting that foundation right comes first.
