É · Éthos and Governance · In design
Learn where help is needed, never who needed it
SOIL is the loop that lets the system improve without building a record of the people it served. De-identified signals only, and a human review queue before anything is allowed to enter the knowledge store.
The rule underneath it
A system must never optimise against its own monitoring signal. The deliberation log is read by people and never used to tune the thing that produced it. That constraint is deliberate and it costs us capability we could otherwise have.
What gets kept
That a category of help was searched for in an area, and whether the record turned out to be current. Not who asked, not when they asked, not anything that could reassemble into a person.
Run the rule on your own words
Type something a person might actually ask. The page shows you the whole record SOIL would keep and everything it lets go. Nothing you type leaves this page.
How to check this
Every line the tool produces is worked out by about a hundred lines of JavaScript inside the page you are reading. Pressing the button sends no request. Open your browser's network tab and try it for yourself: the page pulls its fonts when it first loads, and after that nothing goes out, whatever you type. A privacy claim you can test is worth more than one you have to take on trust.
Honest state
In design. The standard is written; the implementation is not built. It is named here because a privacy promise made after the fact is not a promise.
Where this sits
SOIL™ is one of six instruments under the four-quadrant structure. The whole system, and how the technology is governed, is set out on the About page. If you need help right now, the lifelines are here.