TRACE
Content Accountability Standard

TRACE

TTransparency
RRepresentation
AAccountability
CConsent
EEngagement

A shared standard for evaluating whether content about a community serves it — or extracts from it.

Test Your Content →
The Problem
Communities are the subjects of content they didn't commission, don't control, and can't correct.

This is not new. Externally produced journalism, documentary, and platform-driven content have always raised questions of representation and extraction. What is new is scale.

AI tools now allow any producer, from anywhere, to generate culturally specific content about a community indefinitely and at near-zero cost. Journalism ethics codes bind professional journalists — not NGOs, platforms, researchers, or AI operators. No shared accountability standard exists that communities can invoke and producers can be held to.

TRACE is a proposal toward that standard.

The Standard
T
Transparency
Content must clearly disclose who or what produced it, how, and why — at the point of encounter, not in fine print. Audiences have a right to evaluate what they're consuming. Producers have an obligation to make that evaluation possible.
R
Representation
Content that speaks for, about, or on behalf of a community must accurately reflect that community's actual diversity, complexity, and self-understanding — not a simplified version that serves the producer's narrative or platform's engagement model.
A
Accountability
A genuine feedback mechanism must exist — not a comment form — through which the community can challenge, correct, or remove content. This mechanism must be accessible to community members who are not technically literate, and must have actual power to change outcomes.
C
Consent
No content should attribute views, statements, cultural knowledge, or creative expression to living people without their explicit, informed, and revocable consent. This applies with particular force to community leaders and public figures whose attributed voice carries weight beyond their individual words.
E
Engagement
Content that competes with or substitutes for human creators already doing this work in the community requires, at minimum, an honest assessment of that competition. The stronger standard is active collaboration where existing creators retain meaningful creative authority.
Assessment Tool

Test Your Content

Score any content project against the TRACE standard. Takes about ten minutes. Results in a shareable accountability card.

Open the Scorecard →
Track A
Community-insider, non-commercial, self-funded. 6 categories, 20 points.
Track B
External, institutional, commercial, or mixed. 7 categories, 35 points.
Sample Assessment

A completed TRACE assessment generates a shareable accountability card. This is a real self-assessment from the project that built the standard.

Cariboo Signals Radio
TRACK A — COMMUNITY INSIDER · TRACE ASSESSMENT
Sound
T — Transparency
3/4
R — Representation
3/4
A — Accountability
2/3
C — Consent
4/4
E — Engagement
2/3
B — Community Benefit
1/2
Total Score
15 / 20
Meets the standard with minor gaps. A written improvement plan is recommended before next publication cycle. Accountability mechanism and community benefit documentation are the primary areas for development.
TRACE Content Accountability Standard May 2026
Score Your Content →
Foundation

The Community Content Compact

TRACE is built on the Community Content Compact — a manifesto for ethical content production developed through Cariboo Signals, a community journalism project serving rural British Columbia.

The Compact identifies the structural obstacles that good intentions alone cannot solve: project-based funding that produces pilots instead of infrastructure, and extraction models capitalized at incompatible scale.

Meeting the five conditions is achievable. The obstacle is not technical complexity. It is political.

Read the Compact →
Four Questions for Any Content Partnership
  • 01 Who owns the output?
  • 02 Who owns the audience relationship?
  • 03 Who owns the archive?
  • 04 Does the community hold final editorial authority?
Resources
Assessment Tool
TRACE Scorecard
The interactive scoring tool for both tracks, with all criteria, point values, verdict thresholds, and a shareable accountability card.
→
Policy Brief
Who Gets to Tell a Community's Story?
A brief for funders and policymakers, with three specific asks: mandatory disclosure, governance funding, and community data rights.
→
Foundation Document
The Community Content Compact
The manifesto for ethical content production — five conditions, four questions, and a commitment framework for producers and communities.
→