Methodology & editorial posture
Nimdex is a data-journalism investigation into Ireland's planning system. This page explains where the data comes from, how we sample it, and the rules we follow about what we do and don't show.
Where the data comes from
The Nimdex corpus is assembled from three public sources:
- Local-authority planning portals. We've scraped 368,000+ applications across the 31 Irish local authorities — application metadata, decision codes, and where available, the submitter listing for each application.
- An Bord Pleanála (ABP). Appeal cases, board direction codes, and decision dates.
- Courts.ie. Judicial review judgments and case lists.
For the editorial sample of objections behind the quiz, we extract submission text from PDF objection letters using OCR, then run a two-tier tagging pipeline. Tier 1 is rule-based: it scores submissions for length, emotional register, and theme coverage. Tier 2 is an LLM grader (Claude Haiku) that assigns a press grade (A, B, C), an Irish-register score, a specificity score, and a topic.
What "successful" means in the quiz
The MVP cards use a working definition: a submission is treated as "successful" if it appears to have stopped the development at first instance (council refusal) or on appeal to ABP. The strictest definition — that the project did not actually get built — requires extra verification per case, and is not in the MVP.
Per-card outcomes in the launch sample are reviewed against the public file. Where the outcome is genuinely ambiguous (settled, withdrawn, partial grant), the card is excluded from the deck.
Editorial posture: no submitter names
We never show submitter names on the game screens. Quotes are real, verbatim, from public planning files — but the legal name on the file does not appear on any card or reveal. This is a defamation-hygiene rule, not a data-availability one. The names are in the underlying record, but they don't belong on a card you might share to social media.
We also avoid drone-fear quotes from the Manna prominent dataset on the lead deck. Wind, telecoms-mast, and data-centre objections lead instead. This is an editorial choice: the goal is to surface the texture of Irish objection prose, not to single out one applicant.
What the gravity stats are
Numbers in the gravity panels (e.g. "79% of judicial reviews never reach a written verdict") are calculated from our courts.ie scrape and the application-level outcome data. They come with the report. If a stat is rounded or sampled, the report says so.
What we don't do
- No tracking pixels. No Google Analytics, no Facebook pixel, no Hotjar. The only thing we measure is votes (via UTM-tagged share links and an aggregate vote count), and we do that with a per-browser cookie, not a logged-in identity.
- No back-of-envelope euros. If we don't have a primary-source figure for what a development was worth, we don't put a number on it.
- No spinning of submitter intent. The reveal text describes outcomes, not motives.
Who built this
Nimdex is a Prime Directive AI project, built in collaboration with Inference Advisory. Editorial direction by Matt Cortland.
Contact
Spotted something wrong? Have a case you think belongs on the deck? Email hello@primedirective.ai.