The Permanent Record

What this is

City websites change. Software gets replaced, vendors come and go, and in many towns, years of posted records disappear along the way. Piedmont keeps a second, independent copy of the essentials: whenever the city posts meeting minutes, a public notice, or a news item, the document’s digital fingerprint is filed in a permanent public archive along with the date it was posted. So far, 62 records have been filed.

A fingerprint (technically, a SHA-256 hash) is a short code computed from the exact contents of a file. Change even one letter in the file and the fingerprint changes completely. Because the fingerprint is filed in an archive no one can edit, anyone can later prove that a document is, or is not, the same one the city originally posted.

What it means for you

• Records can’t be silently rewritten. If a posted document were ever altered, its fingerprint would no longer match the one on file. Corrections are still possible. They simply appear as new entries rather than replacing history.
• The record outlives this website. The archive lives outside city servers, so the fingerprints and filing dates survive redesigns, vendor changes, and staff turnover.
• You don’t have to take our word for it. Every filed record shows a “Filed in the permanent record” mark. Expand it to see the fingerprint and the public ledger entry.

How to verify a document yourself

Download the PDF from this site, then compute its SHA-256 fingerprint and compare it to the one shown under the record. On most computers this takes one command:

• Windows (PowerShell): Get-FileHash minutes.pdf -Algorithm SHA256
• Mac (Terminal): shasum -a 256 minutes.pdf
• Linux: sha256sum minutes.pdf

If the codes match, the file in your hands is byte-for-byte the one the city filed. If they don’t, it isn’t.

What is and isn’t in the archive

Only fingerprints and basic public details (title, date, and where the document is posted) are filed. The documents themselves stay on the city’s website, exactly as before. Nothing personal or private is placed in the archive, and the archive adds no new information. It only proves what was already public.

The technical details

For those who want to check the math: the archive is built on Fangorn, an open-source system for verifiable public data. Each record class (minutes, notices, news) is a namespace in the city’s data graph; each filing is a content-addressed entry, and the archive’s current state is settled on a public ledger where every update is timestamped and every previous state remains checkable. The “public ledger entry” link under any filed record opens the corresponding settlement transaction, which anyone can inspect without an account.

Questions about a specific record? Contact City Hall.