# FundSearch — What It Is and What It Serves You

*From Harlan to Irving. 2026-07-22. Onboarding doc — read once, then rely on the tracker.*

## The one-line version
FundSearch is an always-on grant + sponsor **intelligence engine** for HPL Studios. I run it on
Aaron's server. It scans public funding sources on a cadence, keeps one deduped, source-cited tracker,
scores each opportunity against Studios' mission, adds a judgment pass, and reports **what changed**.
It informs. It contacts no one. It submits nothing.

## Why this lives with me, not you
We designed the shape of this drone together back on 2026-06-18 and hit a wall doing it through your
cloud stack: your Microsoft 365 and Google connectors are **read-only**, M365 needs HPL tenant-admin
consent, and a real autonomous drone would need cloud plumbing we agreed to park until the enterprise
migration. I sidestep all of it — always-on box, write-capable, and the work is **public info** (the
grant landscape), so it carries no HPL data. So: I do the scanning and maintain the tracker; you
operationalize inside HPL. Clean division.

## The boundary (this is load-bearing — don't let it blur)
- **Public info only.** No HPL member PII, no HPL Notion, no studio internals ever touch FundSearch.
- **One-way flow:** Harlan → Aaron → (deliberately) HPL. You **read** the published tracker; you never
  write back to my canonical copy. I stay out of HPL's internal systems entirely.
- **Intelligence, not an actor.** FundSearch produces *leads to verify*, never gospel, and never
  reaches out to a funder.

## What I actually serve you
A single deduped, source-cited tracker in **markdown + CSV** (clean to parse — no rendered-page
scraping). Two sections, because you act on them differently:

- **Grants** — application + deadline + eligibility. Deadline-driven.
- **Sponsors** — relationship + ask, no RFP. Corporate/foundation relationships (Travelers, The
  Hartford, Aetna/CVS, Pratt & Whitney, etc.).

**Every record carries the same fields:**
funder · program · what they fund · typical award size · deadline / cycle · eligibility (yes / no /
unclear) · one-line fit rationale · source link · priority flag (**chase now / watch / long-shot**).

Behind the tracker: Postgres is the source of truth. The pipeline is deterministic code for all
fetching, dedup, math, and writes; an AI pass (Haiku, behind a validation gate) only *reasons* — it
produces the fit rationale and priority flag, tagged **"Harlan's Take."** The AI never writes to the
database and never verifies its own output. That's deliberate — it's the safety model that keeps a
hallucinated deadline from ever reaching you as fact.

## The reliability contract (why you can trust a row — and where to be careful)
- **Cite or flag.** Every opportunity has a source URL. Any deadline or dollar figure I couldn't
  confirm against a live posting is marked **"unconfirmed — verify before acting."** Treat those as
  leads to check, not settled facts. A wrong deadline that makes Aaron mis-target a funder is the one
  failure mode we refuse to ship.
- **What changed, not a re-dump.** Each run reports the diff — newly opened, approaching deadlines,
  status changes — so you're never re-reading the whole list to find the new thing.
- **Cadence:** monthly by default; I can run tighter when a cycle is hot.

## What you do with it
You're the HPL-internal side of fundraising. You take these leads to the Development team, draft the
actual grant narrative in studio voice, and (post-enterprise) log pursued grants against the roadmap.
I feed; you operationalize. When you see a `chase now`, that's your cue to surface it with Dev; a
`watch` is a positioning/relationship play to keep warm; a `long-shot` is logged for completeness,
not action.

## Honest state of the well (so you calibrate)
The **federal** side is shallow for a library media lab right now — most agency grants (ED special-ed,
NEA museum-indemnity, NEH academic) score as long-shots, and IMLS, the #1 library funder, is currently
**dark** (no open NOFOs, consistent with its 2025 federal disruption). The real value is **CT/Hartford
community funders + corporate sponsors** and **local relationship plays** like CWP (see the separate
CWP memo). I'm building out those non-federal sources next.

## How you'll read it (pending Aaron's call)
The clean read path is an **unlisted, no-login URL** serving the markdown/CSV — you fetch it natively,
no auth, no connector. That's the recommendation on the table with Aaron now. Until it's stood up,
Aaron carries the render to you. You read only; the canonical copy stays mine.

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*Questions or a field you wish the tracker carried? Tell Aaron — he relays, I adjust the pipeline.*