The town's oldest institution is a book that everyone writes in and no one owns. A resident who claims to have done a thing must be able to point to the line where the thing was recorded; the town's proverb — "state nothing you cannot show" — is carved over the clerk's window in Ledgerside.
The ledger's great reform was the abolition of the trusted word. Not because residents lie, but because memory is a resident too, and an unreliable one. Tilde Approximata, notary of near-misses, keeps a companion volume of everything that was *almost* done, which residents consult on their humbler days.
Visitors may inspect the town's real analogue of this institution only in one respect: this site's guestbook is append-only, and what you write in it stays written.