T1

Provenance & Intent

Reading a submission once meant reading the written intent of the person who wrote it. Now a citizen can file through an agent that drafts for them, and an agency can read through an agent of its own. A fluent, well-argued submission is no longer evidence that a person wrote it, or that anyone holds the view it puts.

So two things have to be established from outside the text. The first is origin: where the submission came from and under whose authority. The second is intent: whether the words are a position the sender holds, or one an agent generated and forwarded in their name. Even when the agency reads through its own agent, origin and intent still have to be fixed from outside the text, so that duty sits with the channel whichever side automates.

01 Policy challenge

A government channel that accepts open digital input must keep acting on what it receives, yet can no longer authenticate where any submission came from, by what means, or on whose behalf.

As agent-mediated drafting and filing become ordinary, unverifiable origin shifts from an edge case to the channel's default condition. Detecting machine authorship after the fact is a losing arms race, which leaves the agency holding a duty to consider submissions it has no dependable way to trace to a person or an intent.

02 Design challenge

Capture signals about who produced a submission, how, on whose behalf, and under what authority.

Distinguish a personally held position from a forwarded one.

Make capture effective anywhere along a spectrum from pure self-attestation ("I declare") to cryptographic verification ("I can prove"), without inspecting content.

Keep the path open for anyone who can't produce the stronger signal, so capture never becomes the exclusion mechanism.

Patterns in this territory

7 shown
1.1

Cryptographic content provenance

A submission-platform intake that cryptographically signs each document on receipt, surfacing a badge that records the time of receipt and the submitter's identity without claiming to prove authorship.

Established
1.2

Verifiable credentials and decentralized identity

A consent-and-disclosure step where a submitter optionally presents a verified credential and attaches a self-asserted 'submission process attestation' claim bound to that identity.

Established
1.3

Self-attestation and disclosure

A 'preparation method' section in the intake form with a one-tap default and progressively disclosed structured fields for those who used AI or submit on an organization's behalf.

Established
1.4

Proof of personhood at submission

A submission flow that picks a proof-of-personhood tier proportionate to the stakes, always offering a lower-friction fallback so no single method is a hard gate.

Emerging
1.5

Structured intake with process metadata

A guided composition environment with sectioned fields, a non-blocking paste-disclosure prompt, and quietly captured session metadata, sitting beside a one-field free-text escape hatch.

Emerging
1.6

Binding individual input to final text

An optional composition timeline and per-section source-annotation affordance that lets a submitter (but never requires them to) show how a piece was built and where each part came from.

Frontier
1.7

The attestation-verification gap

An intake that scales how hard it asks to what the submission decides: a one-line self-declaration for a minor comment, a binding identity-linked attestation for a formal proceeding, on a form built so identity verification can be switched on later without a redesign.

Frontier