Capitol Watchdog

Capitol Watchdog follows California government where it meets the industries it is supposed to regulate. The Air Resources Board, the Attorney General, AQMD, the Energy Commission, Covered California, the Department of Insurance, the DMV, DOGGR, DTSC, the FPPC, the Governor's office, the Legislature, the Medical Board, the Public Utilities Commission, the Secretary of State — each one tracked, each one cross-referenced against energy, insurance, healthcare, oil and technology.

It is also the project The PUC Papers sits inside.

Why the taxonomy is the product

Fifteen agencies and six industries is ninety intersections, and the interesting reporting almost always lives at one of them: this regulator and that industry, over this period. A reader arrives with one of those three coordinates and needs the other two filled in.

So the content model carries all three — agency, industry, and time — and every piece of reporting is filed against them rather than into a single chronological stream. That is what lets somebody land on the Public Utilities Commission and immediately see the energy money, or land on oil and see every agency it touches.

Getting that structure right at the start is most of the work. Retrofitting a taxonomy onto a decade of published reporting is a project nobody ever has budget for, which is why it has to be right before the first article goes in.

The maintenance nobody sees

Agencies reorganise. They rename themselves, merge, retire document servers and move filings without redirects. An accountability archive whose citations have quietly rotted is worth far less than it appears to be, and checking that the evidence still resolves is permanent work rather than a launch task.

What it is for

The site exists so that a pattern is visible. One appointment is a story; the same industry's people appearing across four agencies over eight years is a different story, and it only becomes visible if somebody has been filing it that way the whole time.