About / Contribute

Purpose, editorial rules, and how to add evidence

What this site is

The CSIL History Archive is a public website for a source-based history of Choice in Supports for Independent Living (CSIL) in British Columbia. It privileges an annotated bibliography and source-location records over a closed story. Core history chapters reconstruct what public sources support; missing documents and conflicting dates stay visible.

The site is intentionally small and durable: Markdown files, structured front matter, a bibliography file, and static HTML. There is no database or application backend.

What this site is not

  • A complete history of CSIL or independent living in British Columbia (core chapters are reconstructions from cited sources; many documents remain wanted)
  • A current-program handbook or benefits explainer
  • An advocacy or campaign landing page
  • A place to store private employer, health, or correspondence files

How to read the history

The History chapters follow a possible order of events: earlier housing and support arrangements, then Creekview, ECPM, CSIL’s early years, and later changes. The Creekview chapter reconstructs the mid-1980s project from 1984–89 sources we have read, and it also holds the earlier housing-and-support context. The evidence does not show that Creekview formally became ECPM, or that ECPM formally became CSIL. That sequence remains a possible reading order on History and the Timeline.

Editorial principles

The full contributor guide is CONTRIBUTING.md. In short:

  1. Evidence before narrative.
  2. Prefer sources from the time, or close to the events.
  3. Separate fact, attribution, and interpretation.
  4. Preserve disagreement (including 1993 versus 1994 as a CSIL “established” year, and later official 1994-pilot / 1995-province-wide wording versus 1995 newspaper “new/pilot” language).
  5. Keep advocacy out of the historical record.
  6. Design for accessibility first.
  7. Respect people named in this archive, and their families and colleagues; publish personal material only with permission.

A short summary of what the evidence does and does not show is on the History page.

How to contribute

Useful contributions include:

  • a catalogue record for a public document, with a stable link
  • a correction to a citation, date precision, or status label
  • a scan or transcript only when redistribution is clearly permitted
  • an oral-history note that already has publication permission

How to do it:

  1. Read CONTRIBUTING.md.
  2. Copy the example source record.
  3. Use the source metadata schema and controlled vocabularies.
  4. Open a pull request or a GitHub issue. Describe the item; do not attach files of uncertain rights.

Please do not contact people named in this archive, or their families or colleagues, without a separately agreed research protocol. That work is out of scope for casual website contributions.

Project documentation

Data table
Page Contents
Source metadata schema Front matter fields for source records
Controlled vocabularies Allowed values for type, availability, period, topics
Evidence and verification statuses How uncertainty is labelled
Copyright and source-file policy What may be hosted in documents/
Accessibility Requirements, CI checks, and known limits
Local build instructions How to preview and build the site locally

License

Original writing and configuration in this repository are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Historical source documents, including any future files in documents/, do not inherit that license.

Project note

This public repository was started from jordanforge-infrastructure issue 10. Use that issue as product context only. Do not copy private infrastructure or private CSIL records into this archive.