Lineage

The schools ledger

This site grew out of the West Orange schools ledger at schools.frontstate.org. The ledger keeps a sourced public record of one district's budget decisions, and its How Services Could Work page argues that of the three places health money goes, prices are the one a community can start on now: the federal price-transparency rules put hospital and insurer files into the open (Layer A, Layer B), unevenly in practice, so the work is finding, assessing, and reading them rather than asking anyone's permission. That page proposes a yearly local price table; this site will do the reading and produce the table for the ledger to cite.

The evidence standard (record, statement, press) and the habit of publishing requests and responses in full come from the ledger's design.

Front State

Demicracy is a platform: a decentralized stack a community, or a single household, can run on its own hardware to keep its own records and share the processes that work. The Front State is a community project built on that platform, and it is the civic home of the schools ledger and of this site. The long-term shape is that local communities and individuals host Demicracy instances without needing to relate to Front State at all, and that federating those instances is exactly what lets Front State grow. This site is one record kept that way. "County as configuration" is the shared-template idea made concrete: a second county adopts the pipeline by writing its own config/, not by forking the code.

Nothing on this site argues for Front State or Demicracy. It links to the ledger's services page where a reader would want the argument.

Naming

The site is titled "Cost of Care"; the component carries a shorter name so it can grow into other local costs (insurance premiums, utilities, property tax, child care) without a rename, and that name is also the subdomain under frontstate.org. It carries no Norse name, unlike the infrastructure components around it, because the civic components may move to a Front State GitHub organization.

The name is costs, chosen over prices on 2026-10-24: a prices subdomain reads like the pricing page of a paid service, when the site analyses what care actually costs and how much each party charges or covers. costs matches the title and extends naturally ("Cost of Care", "Cost of Child Care"). Other labels considered have a second meaning that gets in the way: bills reads as legislation on a civic domain, rates as interest or tax rates, charges as the hospital's own list price and as criminal charges, care as caregiving services.

Open

• Whether the civic repositories move from SiliconSaga to a Front State GitHub organization. See Hosting.