About
A public reading archive for failure.
Mission
rootlogic.dev exists to counter a specific bad habit: reducing complex failures to a single cause, attributing that cause to a single person or bug, and moving on. Real failures have layered causes. The press reports the most visible one. The second through fifth causes are often where the durable lessons live.
We write deep post-mortems of notable failures across every industry we can cover credibly. We use a consistent framework so that incidents become comparable. And we publish the underlying records as machine-readable data so that researchers can do what we cannot.
Principles
Blame-free, not accountability-free
We do not name individuals as “the cause.” We do describe organizational decisions, role responsibilities, and systemic conditions. A blame-free analysis is not a gentle one — it is one that looks past the nearest human to the conditions that shaped the choice.
Primary sources over narrative
Journalism is compressed for the reader’s time, which is appropriate for journalism and wrong for root-cause work. We prefer official reports, regulatory filings, court records, and direct operator statements to reporting about those sources.
Disclose uncertainty
“We do not know” is a respectable sentence. Where sources conflict, we say so in the analysis. Where plausibility exceeds confirmation, we mark it.
Revise openly
Analyses get updated as new information emerges. Every revision is disclosed with a date and a changelog entry. We do not silently edit.
No advertising, no paywall, no data collection
The site serves static pages only. It does not accept advertising, does not have user accounts, and does not track reading behavior. The single exception: an optional newsletter, double opt-in, hosted by a third party that we list publicly.
Contributors
rootlogic.dev is maintained by a rotating group of writers with backgrounds in site reliability, aviation safety, financial systems, clinical informatics, and regulatory compliance. We publish under our own names on each analysis. Where domain expertise is required that nobody on the core group has, we commission from working practitioners in the relevant field.
We are not funded by any organization analyzed on this site. Our funding model is grants from foundations that support open scholarship, plus a small optional newsletter subscription. All funding sources are disclosed on the financials page.
FAQ
How do you pick which incidents to analyze?
Three criteria, in priority order: the incident is instructive (the lessons generalize), primary sources are available, and we have or can find the domain expertise to do it justice. Notoriety matters less than teachability.
Will you write about [our incident]?
Maybe. We are more likely to do so if you can point us at primary sources — your own published post-mortem, regulatory filings, court documents. We do not accept paid promotion or paid analysis.
Can I reuse the content?
Yes. All analyses are CC BY-SA 4.0. Machine-readable records are in the public domain. Both the taxonomy and the schema are open.
Why no comments?
Comment sections have a well-documented failure mode of their own. We prefer a smaller number of considered emails that we read and respond to.
Contact
General: hello@rootlogic.dev
Corrections: corrections@rootlogic.dev
Tips and suggestions: use the submit form or email tips@rootlogic.dev