why civic-research dashboards

Most "data-journalism" dashboards on the open web are one of three things: a stunt to drive a single news cycle, a thinly-disguised vendor pitch, or a snapshot of one quarter that nobody updates again. BMRL's civic-research dashboards are an experiment in a fourth posture — long-lived, cited, and dull on purpose.

Dull is the goal. A boring dashboard you can revisit in three years and still trust is more valuable than a flashy one nobody can verify next month. The structural choices follow from that: CSV is the source of truth, every number traces back to a primary source, the build is prerendered so there's nothing to rot at runtime, and the underlying research package ships inside the deploy.

The lab's only economic model is "open by default." Novaprospekt funds the time. No surveillance, no upsell, no captive audience. If a dashboard turns out to be wrong, the fix is a PR and a new deploy — not a press release.