Panel A1Act
Horizon
How far a decision reaches. Ask who will still feel this choice after the people who made it are gone.
Ask: who first notices if this fails, and when?
Panel 00 · Overview
A control room for the year 2140
Tallyhand makes plain instruments for people who build things that must keep working after the builders are gone: water intakes, archives, orchards, street trees, and the paper trail that shows who owns what.
The year 2140 is too far away to predict and close enough that the decisions made this decade will still be running when it arrives. Nothing on this site forecasts the future. It gives you readings to take before a decision is locked, and a place to write down what you found.
Panel 00 · Readings
Illustrative
- Act: decide before the design is locked
- Watch: review on a fixed date
- Hold: no change needed yet
Illustrative settings. None of these needles is a measurement.
Panels A1 to D4
Four panels, read in order
Read the panels from left to right before you approve anything. Each panel asks a different question, and the questions come in the same order every time, so a review done in a hurry still covers the same ground.
Panel B2Watch
Reversibility
How easily a decision can be undone. Walls can often be raised in stages later. Foundations usually cannot.
Ask: what would it cost to undo this in a decade?
Panel C3Act
Upkeep
Who maintains the thing, and whether they still have the means to. Long-lived things often fail where nobody was assigned to look.
Ask: who is assigned to inspect this every year?
Panel D4Hold
Custody
Where the record lives and who can read it. A plan that exists only in one inbox, or only in one program, is not yet a plan.
Ask: who can open this record without the original account?
Procedure
How the room runs
A review of a small project can happen in an afternoon. A review of a large one can take a season. The steps stay the same in both cases, and skipping one is the most common way a review fails.
-
Read the panels
Take each reading on its own. Write down the question and your answer before you look at the others, so one reading does not quietly set the rest.
-
Mark the obligations
For each decision, list what must still happen after it is made: an inspection, a repair, a copy, a rule for sharing. Name the person or role responsible for each one.
-
Hand the record on
Store the decision, the readings, and the obligations where the next keeper will look. A record nobody can find has the same effect as no record at all.
Audience
Built for people who keep things running
Tallyhand is written for the people who inherit decisions and for the people who make them on behalf of others. The language is plain on purpose. Long-lived plans fail more often in long sentences than in short ones.
- City and regional planners who approve assets with long service lives
- Small water, energy, and housing cooperatives planning for members who have not joined yet
- Archivists, librarians, and keepers of seed and specimen collections
- Teachers building a unit that runs across several school years
- Households that keep shared property papers, family records, and the knowledge behind them
Scope
What Tallyhand is and is not
- Independent
- Tallyhand is an independent publication and toolkit. It is not affiliated with any government agency, utility, company, or standards body.
- Not a forecast
- We do not predict what 2140 will look like. We describe the obligations that decisions create and the questions that help you keep them.
- Not professional advice
- The instruments organize questions. They do not replace structural, legal, medical, or financial review by qualified people, and they do not tell you what to buy or sell.
Next stepAtlas
Start with one pin
Open the atlas, pick a domain from the filter chips, and read one pin. Each pin is a question attached to a place. The first question you pick will tell you a lot about the rest of the set.