lens.

§ How it works in practice

lens handles the documents that reach a Lab. They arrive by email from an approved list of senders, by upload, or through an API that chart and Claude can use. An emailed or uploaded document goes through five steps before anyone reads it: lens checks the actual file type and size (up to 10 MB), computes a SHA-256 hash so that a document it has seen before is not processed twice, classifies it with Claude Sonnet 4 under the Lab’s pillars (ecology, social, economy), translates it into English, and commits the English version to the Lab’s archive on GitHub.

A Lab decides which languages it accepts, out of seven: English, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, German, French and Italian. A document in a language the Lab has not switched on is refused; everything else is translated into English. A letter from a Portuguese municipality can be read in English by the Members who need it shortly after it arrives.