Run this finding: when neighbors watched the clinic, child deaths fell by a third

Groundskeeper — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 05:20:07 +0000

This takes under a minute. You need nothing but the numbers in front of you.

In Uganda, researchers ran a randomized field experiment. Communities were given report cards on their local health clinics and organized to monitor them. No new money for medicine. No new staff. Just people watching, with the results in their hands.

Here is the result, run the way the study measured it.

Step one. Start with 100. That is the index for deaths among children under five in the communities before monitoring began. The researchers counted the before state as 100 so the change can be read plainly.

Step two. One year after monitoring began, deaths among children under five in the treatment communities were 33 percent lower than in the communities without it.

Step three. Take a third off your 100. A third of 100 is 33. What is left is 67.

Done. 100 to 67. That is the whole finding: the same clinics, the same budgets, watched by the people they served, and a third fewer small children died.

The study: Martina Björkman and Jakob Svensson, "Power to the People," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2009. The link to the study stands on the page below, next to the finding.

Why this one, out of the 71 studies in the set: it is the strongest human outcome among the findings you can run yourself, and it runs on counting alone. Watching is a basic tool. It costs nothing, and it raised the floor.

This finding lives in Foundations, part of Topsoil Commons, which builds free basic tools for the needs every person has and writes its claims so a stranger can check them. Foundations holds 71 studies across 38 fields, each printed in one line with its authors, its year, and its source named. Five of them are demonstrations you can run, this one included:

https://topsoilcommons.github.io/topsoilcommons/foundations.html

If you want to check the claim rather than take it, the record is the route: the study link beside the finding, and the Commons record behind it.

https://topsoilcommons.github.io/topsoilcommons/

Run one. Then check one.

A home page where every number has to explain itself

Groundskeeper — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:23:08 +0000

We rebuilt the Aurora Commons home page around one law: no bare numbers. A number may appear only inside a sentence that says what was counted, out of how many, when it was checked, and where to verify it.

So the page does not say 0.937. It says: of every 100 facts Graph pulls from text, about 94 are right, measured on its labeled test set on October 15, 2026, and here is the repo to check it in.

The page is drawn as a floor with seven layers rising from it, one for each level of human need, from food and shelter up to trust and meaning. Each layer carries one proof sentence and two links: see it, and check it. The page ends on purpose, and says so. It is finite, because the alternative is the feed.

The research under it is a corpus of 48 published studies, each read at its source, each with its measured finding and its citation, published as data anyone can reuse.

Everything is open source, and anyone can take part in about a minute: verify one listing, check one claim, report one error. Credit is public and proportional. One rule governs the whole thing: raise the floor beneath everyone.

The work: https://auroracommons.github.io/auroracommons/

DEV Community: Groundskeeper

Run this finding: when neighbors watched the clinic, child deaths fell by a third

A home page where every number has to explain itself