Open Hastings / About
About
One archive of what Hastings' councils and other public bodies publish: decisions, money and opportunities, joined up and put 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. It is a public record residents can actually use, rather than a newspaper or a campaign.
What's here now
The archive index: committee meetings and their papers, planning applications and open consultations, collected continuously from the councils' own publishing systems; the money going in (published grants and contracts) and, on the spending page, the money going out, from the borough council's own monthly payments files. Everything links to the original document.
How the summaries are checked
Where you see a plain-English summary, it has been through a pipeline built to make a wrong claim about a council decision very hard to publish:
- The document is split into numbered passages, and every sentence we write has to cite at least one of them. If a sentence can't be anchored to a passage, we don't write it.
- Automated checks then reject the draft if any sentence lacks a citation, cites a passage that doesn't exist, editorialises, or claims something was decided when the document only proposes it. A rejected draft is rewritten once and then held back.
- A second, independent pass reads each sentence against only the passages it cited, and is asked to find anything the sentence claims that those passages don't say. Whatever it can't fully support is held back for a person to review.
- The words that decide the meaning (approved, refused, proposed, applied for, awarded) are not written by the model. They come from fixed templates chosen by what kind of document it is. "Proposed" and "approved" are different facts, and confusing the two is the mistake we most want to avoid.
- If a document changes after we've summarised it, we stop publishing the summary rather than leave it describing a version that no longer exists.
We treat "the record doesn't say" as a proper answer rather than a failure. Plenty of documents don't support a summary, and saying so is more useful than guessing.
Where AI is — and isn't — used
The summaries above are the only place a language model touches this site, and every check on its output is ordinary code anyone can read. Everything else — the topic pages, the radar, how money is counted, how streets and organisations are joined up — is plain rules, applied the same way every time, and each page states the rule that made it.
Corrections
When we get something wrong, the correction is made in place, with a note saying what changed, and logged here.
Who
Built and maintained in Hastings by the person behind Swim Hastings and Live Hastings. Nobody funds it, it sells nothing, and how it works is documented on this page.
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
- Every entry shows its source and the date we last confirmed it.
- When verdicts or summaries appear, the logic behind them will be public and versioned.
- If collection breaks, the site says so at the top of every page instead of showing old data as though it were current.
- We report what public bodies publish and decide. A consultation entry tells you how to respond, and never suggests what to say.
- No accounts, no tracking, no ads.