The State Arrives as a Scan: Building Syria's Open Record, and Making It Forkable

The talk walks the system end to end. The press layer indexes 1,300+ sources and labels each by faction, so a reader sees who is speaking before what is said. The record layer is the Official Gazette: a 107-year-old append-only log that took vetting to receive and could not be searched. It is now open: 80,599 decrees, 3,063 companies, 4,295 named persons across 749 issues, bilingual, traceable to source lines. Search one family name and ministers appear beside company founders. Arabic models run on our own hardware; a human signs off before anything publishes. I'll show the lessons we paid most for. Identity is the hardest table in any civic register: one Arabic letter can turn a founder into two people. How we verify every stage, scan to published page. Why replication beat a chain for this threat model, and where my EF Fellowship research says chains do help. And the Arabic-first starter kit that groups outside Syria are building on.

Speakers: Karam Alhamad

Track: Rights, Freedoms, and Governance