Engineering a new, more rigorous journalism — collaborators wanted
Nowhere is a terminal-first, Rust-native project that treats evidence, provenance, and reproducibility as first principles.
Demo
30-second simple walkthrough. Everything is behind a UUID for demo purposes.
Where help is needed
This is a community effort to make journalism more rigorous and transparent. Not just developers — we welcome reporters, editors, OSINT researchers, designers, ethicists, educators, and readers who care about method.
Engineering & Data
- Runtime & actors: mailbox/backpressure tuning, rate-limiter actor, cancellation semantics.
- Evidence graph v1: schema/migrations for records, links, claims; append-only discipline; signed bundles.
- Normalizers: PDF/TXT/Twitter-like adapters with prompt versioning and deterministic post-processing.
- TUI ergonomics: claim review flows, accept/counter-evidence UX, export of auditable bundles.
- Data viz & docs: small charts, example bundles, clear README/quickstart guides.
Journalism, Product & Ethics
- Pilot investigations: propose non-sensitive, verifiable claims; help shape the workflow.
- Method writing: checklists, reproducible methodology pages, style guides for evidence bundles.
- Editorial review & fact-checking: acceptance criteria, counter-evidence norms, sourcing discipline.
- Design & accessibility: clearer copy, UX writing, contrast/typography, review of TUI interactions.
- Ethics & redaction: practical guidance for what belongs in public bundles (PII, safety, consent).
- Legal & policy: platform ToS, FOIA workflows, public-interest publication considerations.
- Community & outreach: code of conduct, onboarding, moderation, case studies, translation/localization.
Philosophy — evidence before interpretation
- Transparency over persuasion. Every transformation leaves a footprint.
- Provenance before narrative. Sources and links are first-class.
- Reproducibility over authority. Same inputs → same outputs.
- Tools, not takes. Infrastructure that lets the public audit how we know.
Nowhere is not a newsroom. It is the substrate on which rigorous journalism can be practiced in the open — by reporters, OSINT researchers, and the public.
Architecture — what we’re building
1) Actor Runtime
A Rust actor system orchestrating acquisition → normalization → storage with bounded mailboxes and shared rate limiting. Deterministic by design; observability baked in.
2) Evidence Graph
An append-only, queryable ledger of record,
link, and claim with typed provenance
(supports, refutes, derived-from). Built
for audit, replay, and publication as signed bundles.
3) Graph-Trained Models (longer-term)
Bespoke LLMs trained over the evidence graph so models learn to prefer grounded reasoning and provenance — refusing speculation when sources are absent.
Raw data (social, docs, archives)
↓
Actors (acquire → normalize)
↓
Evidence Graph (records + links + claims)
↓
Human review (accept / annotate / counter-evidence)
↓
Auditable bundle (signed, reproducible)
Configuration, commands, and implementation details live in the README. This page is the call to build the foundation together.
Roadmap
- Evidence Graph v1 → v2: typed entities; deterministic views; signed commits.
- Reproducible pipelines: locked models/prompts; replayable investigations.
- Graph reasoning: confidence propagation across supports/refutes.
- Graph-trained LLMs: fine-tuning on provenance-grounded corpora.
- Distributed event store: append-only DAG; peer-verifiable bundles.
- Field/offline mode: secure capture → later sync; reproducible builds.
Nowhere-Phone
A Rust-first, privacy-preserving field device for secure messaging, calling, and evidence capture — designed to pair with the evidence graph and reproducible bundles.
Seeking private collaborators starting January 2026 prior to a public release. Relevant domains include resilient comms, secure UX, and (potentially) on-device ML.