A return shows what was paid. Not why, and not when it was decided.
Write one committee decision: what was decided, the figures it rested on, the path declined, who approved it. Your browser records its fingerprint today. You keep the words; anyone you hand them to can check the date.
Written by the committee, dated by the ledger.
Your words stay in this browser. We receive and keep only a 64-character fingerprint of them. No account.
The questions that arrive years later.
The auditor: When was the payout decided, and by whom?
The file answers with the decision, two names and a date nobody can move. Not a reconstruction from email.
The examiner: What did the committee know at the time?
The figures it rested on, written that day. A later year's numbers cannot be read back into it.
The next trustee: Why this and not the alternative?
The path declined and the condition that would reopen it, in the committee's own words.
What leaves the browser, what is kept, by whom.
What leaves the browser
What we keep
What the committee keeps
What the date rests on
What it is not
These are facts about the page, each held by a test that runs before every release. The method is public: SHA-256 over the file’s canonical form. Check any decision file without asking us.
Do you see the decision?
No. Your browser computes a 64-character fingerprint of what you wrote, plus a random value so the fingerprint cannot be guessed back into words, and sends only that. The route refuses any request that carries more than the fingerprint.
What does the record prove?
That these exact words existed on the date recorded, and that they have not changed since. The date is the ledger's, written into the daily public log under an independent timestamp. It does not prove the decision was right, and nothing here says so.
What if we lose the file?
Then nobody, us included, can show what it said: we hold only the fingerprint. Keep it with the minutes. The file is plain text and readable in any editor.
Can a decision be recorded again with a later date?
Recording the same file twice changes nothing: the first date stands. Edit a single character and it is a different decision with its own date, and the earlier file still checks as the earlier one.
Why is it free?
Because one decision is the plainest way to see what the Foundation Record does for every decision of the year: the figures, the reasoning and the approvals, held together, dated and unchanged.
Every decision of the year, held the same way.
The Foundation Record keeps the payout figures, the committee's reasoning and its approvals together, dated and unchanged, ready for the auditor's request list.