Track official relationships, business interests, and family ties

[AndreRobitaille]

Problem

Residents want to understand potential conflicts of interest and relationships between officials. This data affects multiple areas:

• Member profile pages (who is related to whom)
• Topic/meeting summaries (context for why a vote or appointment matters)
• Impact scoring (family handoffs on land-use bodies, business interests in TIF decisions)

Currently, the prompt template data recognizes these as high-importance signals (score 5 for conflict-of-interest patterns), but there's no structured data to feed into prompts or display on pages.

Examples

• Married couples serving on different committees
• Officials who own businesses affected by zoning/TIF decisions
• Family members appointed to seats previously held by relatives

Constraints

• Must not be admin-heavy — the site should not require constant manual curation
• Need to figure out the right data model (structured relationships vs. free-text notes vs. KnowledgeSource entries)
• Presentation must be factual and neutral — "all we're doing is saying what we know"
• Relationships change over time — need to handle temporality

Scope

This is a design problem, not an implementation ticket. Needs brainstorming on:

1. Data model for relationships (member↔member, member↔business, member↔organization)
2. How to populate it (admin entry? AI extraction from minutes? both?)
3. How to surface it (member pages, AI prompt context, summary enrichment)
4. How to keep it maintainable without constant admin effort

[AndreRobitaille]

Status (2026-04-14): still open, still a design problem. Related: #59 (entity/stance pipeline) has overlapping concerns — the EntityFact model in schema might be the right home for relationship data but remains an empty stub. Consider resolving the design question here before implementing either.