The README opened with "It runs in production as rixdagen.se", which reads as though
this repository is that website — or that cloning it gets you a copy of it. Neither is
true: rixdagen.se is a fork with its own configuration and server setup, and plenum is
software you run against your own parliament.
Now says so, and explains why Sweden is here at all: it is the instance the project is
tested against, so its config, ingest adapter and prompts ship as the worked example to
copy from.
Most people arriving here will set this up with an assistant, and the guide for that
was buried in a table two thirds down the page. It is now the first thing after the
introduction, with the starting prompt inline so it can be copied without opening
another file.
Also says what the assistant will do first — run the doctor — so the reader knows the
machine gets inspected before they are asked anything.
A fork for Hungary would have looked Swedish. Only party colours were configurable —
the warm paper, the institutional blue and the Garamond serif were hardcoded, and that
palette was drawn from riksdagen.se deliberately. Nothing said so anywhere. A `theme:`
block now sets those as CSS custom properties at runtime, the same mechanism party
colours already used, so no stylesheet needs editing. README and PORTING.md both say
plainly that the default is not neutral.
scripts/doctor.py reports what a machine can and cannot do: Python and dependencies,
PostgreSQL with its extensions and text-search setting, schema and row counts, the chat
endpoint, whether that model can actually call tools, the embedding dimension against
the configured one, GPU, sudo, and which ports are free. It changes nothing and exits
non-zero on failures so a script can gate on it. Tool calling is checked separately
because a model can converse perfectly and still never call a tool, which here means
confident answers with no sources.
docs/ASSISTANT-SETUP.md is a prompt plus the interview an assistant should run: ask the
doctor before asking the user, one section at a time, always recommend a default, never
invent a parliament's colours or data URL, and verify each stage with real output
rather than an exit code.
Verified against the live deployment: 26 checks OK, no failures.
The README told people to clone. For anyone adapting this to their own parliament
that is wrong: they cannot push, so their work is stranded on one machine, and
pulling in later updates is awkward. docs/YOUR-PARLIAMENT.md covers forking, and the
habit that decides whether future updates are painless — add files rather than edit
them, so git never has to merge the same file twice.
Writing it meant walking through a Norwegian adaptation for real, which found two
things that would have stopped a user on their first attempt.
A relative PARLIAMENT_CONFIG resolved against the current directory, so
`PARLIAMENT_CONFIG=parliament.no.yaml` worked when you happened to be standing in the
repository and failed everywhere else, including under systemd. Relative paths now
resolve against the repository, for PROMPTS_DIR and CONTENT_DIR too.
Worse, YAML 1.1 reads unquoted `no`, `yes`, `on`, `off`, `y` and `n` as booleans.
Norway is the worst possible case: `country: NO` and `prompt_language: no` both became
false, and the symptom was a TypeError deep inside a path join that named nothing
relevant. Text fields are now coerced back, and both parliament.yaml and the guide say
to quote such values, since the repair cannot recover the original capitalisation.
Verified by building a Norwegian fork the way the guide describes — adding
parliament.no.yaml, prompts/no/ and an adapter, editing nothing — and confirming the
app loads it. Sweden is unaffected and production still serves.
The README's documentation index is now grouped by what you are trying to do, with a
sentence on each entry rather than a bare filename.
docs/eval-scorer.md was notes-to-self for work already finished. It told the reader to
add a class to eval_harness.py that has been there for months, specified the author's
own GPU by model number, and carried escaped-markdown artifacts from a bad paste. The
feature is real and was used — 9 eval runs, 668 questions, 3536 judgments — so the fix
is documentation, not deletion.
It now explains what coverage scoring measures and why it is worth having alongside
the judge model: the judge catches claims a source contradicts, the cross-encoder
catches claims a source simply does not cover. Includes how to read the number, and
the query that finds the interesting cases — paragraphs the judge passed but the
scorer did not, which is where technically-defensible-but-misleading answers show up.
The scorer defaulted to port 8001, which is also the MCP server's default, so running
both meant one silently failed to bind. Moved to 8005 and documented.
SCORER_ENDPOINT is now in .env.example, and the README has a documentation index —
every file under docs/ was previously unreachable from anywhere in the repo.
recovery.sh migrated data out of ArangoDB. This project abandoned Arango before the
extraction, and no one cloning plenum has an Arango server to migrate from — it was
carried over by inertia.
scripts/deploy_debate_embeddings.sh and deploy_summary_embeddings.sh were one-off
rollout scripts for features whose columns are now part of the base schema, so a fresh
install already has them.
scripts/correct_arguments.py was a single corrective pass over a specific extraction
error made by a specific small model on Swedish speeches from 2002 onward. Not
reusable, and not something a new deployment should run.
_postgres/rename_map.py and scripts/generate_rename_migration.py produced the
Swedish-to-English migration. That migration is written, applied, and its rollback
verified; the generator has no remaining use and the map described a schema that no
longer exists.
Root __init__.py was empty and made the repository look like an importable package,
which it is not.
scripts/test_auth_e2e.py moved to tests/ — it is a test, and putting it in scripts/
implied it was an operational tool.
Kept deliberately: the eval harness and its analysis scripts, which are a documented
feature rather than leftovers, and the embed/summarise/debate pipeline scripts, which
any deployment needs after an ingest run.
providers.template.yaml was a Raycast AI template. It named Raycast in its comments
and used api_keys/abilities/context — none of which provider_registry.py reads, while
omitting user_api_key and server_api_key_env, which it requires. Anyone copying it
got a file the application ignored. Replaced with one matching the code, covering
vLLM, Ollama, OpenRouter, Berget, OpenAI and Gemini.
docs/SETUP.md is written to be executed rather than skimmed: what the four external
dependencies are and which are optional, how to choose between providers, and a
verification command after every step that calls the real thing. Chat and tool calling
are checked separately, because a model can hold a conversation perfectly and still
never call a tool — which in this project means confident answers with no sources, the
one failure mode that matters most here.
Embeddings get their own section because they are a separate endpoint from chat and
conflating the two is the most common setup mistake, and because the dimension is
load-bearing: changing the model means re-embedding the whole corpus.
Ends with a symptom/cause/fix table covering the traps found during the production
cutover — the EnvironmentFile parsing difference, app.fts_config not surviving a
restore, and .env being unsourceable in bash.
Verified: every verification block in the guide was run against the live deployment.
Site copy now resolves through CONTENT_DIR, alongside PARLIAMENT_CONFIG and
PROMPTS_DIR. All three let a deployment keep its own wording, branding and contact
details outside the repository, so they never appear in a diff against upstream —
which is what keeps a production fork mergeable.
parliament.yaml's site.title was "rixdagen.se". That is the deployment's identity,
not Sweden's data, so upstream now ships a neutral default. The Swedish user guide
keeps its content but loses the personal contact details and site-specific wording;
a deployment ships its own guide by pointing CONTENT_DIR at it.
Fixes /api/guide, which still read ../user-guide.md after that file moved to
content/sv/ and had been returning 404.
Deliberately kept: the author metadata in pyproject.toml and the copyright line in
LICENSE, which are attribution rather than configuration, and the README's note that
this runs in production as rixdagen.se, which is provenance worth stating.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
README, PORTING.md and SCHEMA.md all described Swedish column names that no longer
exist. SCHEMA.md is rewritten around the English names and now explains why the
awkward ones are what they are: speaker_name rather than speaker (English "Speaker"
is the presiding officer), session_label rather than term (the European Parliament
uses term for its five-year cycle), document_proposals for a concept English has no
single word for.
Also records two things learned while verifying the migration: pg_dump does not
capture database-level settings, so a restore silently loses app.fts_config and
searches come back empty with no error; and saved chat snapshots contain SQL written
against the old column names, which is why the rename cannot be a clean break.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
AGPL-3.0-or-later, with a README note offering other terms on request for
newsrooms and public-interest projects.
README rewritten in English, replacing a 55 KB Swedish document that described a
Sweden-only tool. It states plainly what is and is not yet country-agnostic rather
than overselling: the schema still carries Swedish column names, and docs/SCHEMA.md
translates them until the rename lands.
docs/PORTING.md is the guide this whole effort exists for — what a Bulgarian, UK or
EU deployment actually has to write. It is honest about the parts that are real work
(the ingest adapter, data quality, the untranslated UI) and about the assumption
underneath the data model, so nobody invests in an adapter for a parliament that does
not fit.
SECURITY.md documents the database_query issue rather than leaving deployers to find
it, and gives the read-only role to run against. .env.example documents all 48
environment variables, which were previously discoverable only by grep.
CI runs ruff, applies schema.sql to a clean pgvector database, runs the tests, builds
the frontend, and scans for secrets. The schema step exists because that file drifted
from production once already. tsc is non-blocking until the nine inherited type
errors are fixed.
Makefile rewritten around a documented setup/dev/test/lint flow, and carries the
check-fork-divergence target the production fork uses to prove it differs from
upstream only under deploy/prod/.
Also removed the personal GitHub Copilot instructions file.
Verified: no secrets, no personal contact details, and no private IPs or hostnames
in shipped source; backend still imports.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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