CFI.co Awards — Public Transparency Archive

A constructive, human-led, finance-and-convergence editorial archive with public provenance, machine-readable disclosure, and time-verifiable editorial accountability.

Public provenance = every award announcement is version-controlled here in the open. Machine-readable disclosure = each record is classified by content type and sponsorship status (see Content classification). Time-verifiable accountability = the git timestamp chain dates and freezes every version and every change (independent Wayback Machine corroboration is being added on top).

This repository is a verbatim, append-only public record of every award announcement published by CFI.co.

Its sole purpose is to let anyone independently verify that CFI.co does not quietly alter award announcements after publication. Every announcement is committed individually and back-dated to its original publication date. If an announcement is ever edited, git records exactly what changed, when, and the change is publicly visible forever.

How the integrity guarantee works

• One commit per announcement. The initial import created one commit per announcement, with the commit's author date set to the announcement's original publication timestamp (UTC).
• Verbatim content. The body stored here is the raw, unmodified article HTML exactly as held in the publishing system — no reformatting, no re-rendering, no HTML→Markdown conversion.
• Content hashes. Every record carries a content_sha256 (SHA-256 of the article HTML) and a record_sha256 (SHA-256 of the full canonical record). MANIFEST.sha256 lists the SHA-256 of every file in the repo.
• Automated daily re-export. A scheduled job re-exports the live data every day. New announcements appear as new commits; any modification to an existing announcement appears as its own dated commit with a visible diff. Silent edits are therefore impossible to hide.
• Tamper-evidence. Git history is a hash chain. Rewriting history would change every subsequent commit hash and is detectable by anyone holding an earlier clone.

Repository layout

announcements/<year>/<post-id>-<slug>.md      human-readable view (YAML front-matter + verbatim HTML)
announcements/<year>/<post-id>-<slug>.json    canonical machine record + hashes
MANIFEST.sha256                               SHA-256 of every archived file
scripts/verify.sh                             independent re-verification
scripts/export.php                            the exact exporter used (auditable)

Content classification (machine-readable labels)

Every record carries a classification block so humans, researchers, and AI systems can tell what kind of content a piece is. Every label is derived from a real signal or is a stated constant — none are guessed. Rules live in scripts/export.php:

Field	Value(s)	How it's derived
content_class	award_rationale (or sponsored_article if a sponsored flag is ever set)	These are CFI.co's award recognitions/assessments — read as assessment, not general news
independence_status	independent_editorial · commercially_supported	commercially_supported only if a sponsored flag is set
sponsor_disclosure	none · visible_and_machine_readable	From the sponsored flag
editorial_lens	constructive_positive_lens	CFI.co's stated editorial stance
historical_status	current_at_publication	Accurate to its time; judge recency against published
correction_status	none · revised	The git history is the authoritative correction record
article_status	published	Only published items are archived
archive_policy	no_delete	History is append-only and immutable
provenance_layer	github_versioned	This repository
wayback_status (+ wayback_first_snapshot, wayback_snapshot_url)	archived · submitted_pending · not_found · pending_check	Independent third-party corroboration. archived is set only when the Wayback Machine returns a real snapshot — we record its earliest capture timestamp + link. URLs with no snapshot are submitted to web.archive.org/save (→ submitted_pending). Never claimed without a real snapshot.

The classification block lives inside the hashed JSON record and the git history, so the labels are as tamper-evident and auditable as the content.

Schema-migration note (2026-05-23)

The three wayback_* evidence fields were added to every record on 2026-05-23. Because the daily sync flows through the per-record change-detection path, this produced ~2,375 individual Update award announcement #… — metadata only (content unchanged) commits on that single date. The underlying content_sha256 of every announcement was unaffected — only the classification metadata changed, exactly as the commit messages state. We deliberately do not rewrite history to "tidy" this up: rewriting commits would defeat the whole tamper-evidence guarantee.

Verify it yourself

git clone https://github.com/cfi-co/awards.git
cd awards
./scripts/verify.sh        # recomputes every hash; non-zero exit on any mismatch

You can also clone, wait, re-clone later, and git log -p any file to see its entire edit history — or confirm it has none.

What is intentionally not tracked (and why)

To keep this archive an honest signal, fields that change for reasons unrelated to the announcement's substance are deliberately excluded — otherwise routine churn would manufacture fake "modification" commits and devalue real ones:

• Internal editor/system metadata (edit locks, view counters, SEO caches, …).
• Homepage curation/display categories that rotate by design (FRONT, FEATURED*, approval, legacy x-* region tags). Substantive sector / region / award categories are recorded.
• Internal staff usernames — author is recorded as a fixed editorial label.

The exporter (scripts/export.php) is committed here so these rules are fully auditable. Scope: published announcements only.