One archive of everything Hastings' institutions publish — decisions, money, opportunities — joined up and translated into plain English, with every claim linked to its source.
Why
Committee packs run to hundreds of pages. Grant awards sit in databases nobody browses. Consultations close before the people they affect hear about them. The local press that once translated all of this has largely collapsed. Open Hastings is being built to fill that gap: not a newspaper, not a campaign — a public record that residents can actually use.
What's here now
The archive index: committee meetings and their papers, and open consultations, collected continuously from the councils' own publishing systems. Everything links to the original document. Summaries, the weekly digest, the money map and matched opportunity alerts arrive as each earns its way through our checking pipeline — a fact-checking layer where every sentence must cite the passage it comes from, verified before anything publishes.
Who
Built and maintained in Hastings by the maker of Swim Hastings and Live Hastings, as independent civic infrastructure: open about its methods, funded by nobody, selling nothing. Questions, corrections, ideas: laurie@hey.com.
Sources & licensing
Committee papers link to East Sussex County Council's and (once machine access is arranged) Hastings Borough Council's own committee systems; consultation listings link to hastings.gov.uk. Documents remain © their publishing authorities; this site indexes and links rather than mirrors. Public-sector information is used in the spirit and, where applicable, the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0.
The rules
- Provenance on everything: source and last-confirmed date on every entry.
- Published rules: when verdicts or summaries appear, the logic behind them will be public and versioned.
- Fail loud: if collection breaks, the site says so rather than quietly showing old data.
- Neutrality: we report what institutions publish and decide; consultation entries show the response route, never a recommended response.
- No accounts, no tracking, no ads.