A plain account of how this proposal has changed and why, newest first. A grant proposal that is rewritten twenty times before it is submitted should be able to show its working, so this page is that working. Each entry says what changed and what it was for.
This is a $10,000 request to the Wyoming Business Council for a twelve-month pilot program in Washakie County: twelve working websites for local institutions and small businesses, four public workshops, and a written method anybody can follow afterward without paying anyone.
It has not been submitted. The deadline is 1 March 2027 and the proposal is written; what is missing is a sponsor. The program funds organizations rather than individuals, so a local body has to be the applicant. That is the first blocker and it has been the first blocker since the beginning — but as of 30 September it has a name attached to it for the first time.
Two sample sites now exist to show what the twelve would be — an invented farm and an invented tree service — and there is a second funder identified, so a refusal in March is no longer the end of it.
Twenty sources, all fetched and previewed in the middle column. The page argues nothing it cannot show.
The page was describing what the technology does and never saying what the person does. The claim read “generates useful, practical websites automatically” — and to somebody uneasy about the words artificial intelligence, “automatically” is not reassuring. It reads as something happening to you, which is close to the thing people are actually afraid of.
So the first thing under the headline, ahead of the claim and well above the threshold, is now the plainest possible statement of the bargain: you say what you want, in your own words, and it does the work. No course, nothing to install, no vocabulary to acquire. The skill it asks for is one the reader already has.
That is not a softening of the pitch, it is the pitch. The usual reason a small operation here has no website is not cost and not indifference — it is that the first step has always been to learn something, somebody else’s builder or template or vocabulary. That first step is gone, and it is the one change that makes any of this worth proposing. Column A gained a matching first answer saying the same thing at length, ahead of “why does Washakie County need this.” The search and link-preview descriptions were corrected too, since they carried the old framing wherever the page gets shared.
Caught in checking: the new styling was first written into a noscript block, so it applied only with scripting switched off and the block rendered as plain paragraphs. It is in the real stylesheet now.
For two weeks this page has said the same thing: the program funds organizations, not individuals, and no organization has been asked. There is now a candidate, and it was hiding in a link supplied on 24 September.
The Washakie Development Association is a private 501(c)(6) economic development organization in Worland — which is precisely the category the Business Council names among eligible applicants, occupied by a real body rather than a hypothetical one. Being private, it carries none of the county’s procurement machinery: no commission vote in open meeting, no purchasing policy, no quarterly agenda.
What makes it more than a name on a list is how it was found. One of the three links offered on 24 September was hometownmatters.buzzsprout.com, described then as a podcast that interviews local businesses. The podcast turns out to belong to the Development Association, and its host is the Association’s executive director. The sponsor and the introduction are the same telephone call.
A fallback is recorded alongside it. The Washakie County Library Foundation is a live charity — an IRS ruling in 2015, a return filed last month, two million dollars in assets — and it is the only candidate with charitable status, which matters for any program written for (c)(3) organizations. A (c)(6) is not one.
Also identified: the Business Council’s Northwest regional director, whose region covers this county. She is the person who can say in ninety seconds whether this proposal is in the right program at all, which is worth more than a hearing.
A draft written for this project claimed the pilot already had twelve sites running. It does not. It has two working sites on real subjects, and two demonstrations whose businesses are invented — a fact those two sites state in their own titles and on their own front pages.
The error is worth recording rather than quietly fixing, because it is the characteristic failure of writing about a proposal: the twelve sites are so central to the argument that a summary slides from proposed to existing without anybody deciding to lie. Any machine summarizing this page will make the same slide. So the three categories are now a rule that every document and every generated artifact has to keep apart: built, demonstrated, proposed.
This page has always done it correctly, and continues to. The twelve sites are proposed. The FFA has not been asked. The sponsor has not been approached.
Two narration scripts exist, under one title: Grassroots AI in Wyoming. The first makes the case; the second walks the roles chart step by step, using the FFA as a worked example and taking care to say, twice, that nobody has asked them.
Both begin from a fixed point rather than from the proposal. On 3 June 2026 the Governor signed Executive Order 2026‑03, Data Centers the Wyoming Way, setting the state’s terms for the industry: minimize water consumption, maintain stewardship of wildlife and natural resources, keep new infrastructure costs off residential and small‑business ratepayers, generate revenue for host communities, and build a workforce with the University, the community colleges and the school districts.
The argument agrees with every one of those terms — they are the right concerns, correctly stated, for a gigawatt — and then observes what they have in common. Each is about the data centers themselves. Wyoming is building the engine room and planning the workforce to staff it; nothing in the order teaches the rest of the state to drive. This pilot is the other half, at a thousandth of the scale.
A video channel now exists and carries a short first piece. A longer one, a two‑host discussion and a slide deck are drafted but not made.
Until today this page named exactly one funder and one deadline, which is a poor bet on a competitive program and a second single point of failure next to the sponsor problem. USDA Rural Business Development Grants is now named as the real alternative: the same shape of applicant, so the sponsor hunt is not wasted; eligible uses that name business counseling and training, which is what four workshops and twelve built sites are; no cost-sharing requirement; and, unusually, smaller requests given higher priority — which makes a $10,000 ask a strength there rather than something to apologize for. Its deadline falls in summer, after 1 March, so it sequences as the fallback rather than a competitor.
Wyoming Humanities was checked the same day and ruled out — nonprofits only, humanities scholar required, one-to-one match, and it has lost its state appropriation. It is named on the page anyway, so that nobody spends a week rediscovering it.
Walter supplied three links. One of them, the Worland Ten Sleep Chamber of Commerce, is the most natural sponsor on the list: its stated purpose is strengthening local businesses and keeping dollars local, which is what twelve small-business sites and four public workshops physically are.
It is also the least certain, and the page says so. The Chamber’s own site describes it as a 501(c)(7) organization — the designation for a social or recreational club, not the 501(c)(6) a chamber of commerce normally holds. Whether that affects eligibility is not guessed at here. It is a question for the Chamber first and the Business Council second, in that order.
The same day, Hometown Matters — the county’s weekly podcast, past 125 episodes, interviewing local businesses since 2024 — was added to the calendar as a second thing to do now. Twelve subjects have to come forward for any of this to work, and that is a room where they already are. It costs nothing, which makes it the cheapest item in the whole plan.
The cast figure had five roles floating in space. It is now a proper organization chart — ranked boxes, right-angle connectors, a plain rank line where one body simply sits above another. The ambassadors sit beside the trainees on a broken outline and a dashed connector, which is the standard notation for a relationship that is indirect or not arranged. The convention carries the meaning without a caption: nobody has asked them.
The hoped-for ambassadors are the county’s FFA chapters — Chief Washakie at Worland High School and Ten Sleep, both rated Gold in 2026. They are now named where they can be seen rather than buried, with the chapter awards page cited.
The answer ends on a paragraph headed “Nobody has asked them.” Not a call, not an email. It is written down before it is acted on, so that a reader can check later whether it was ever done. A proposal that names its hopes as hopes is worth more than one that lets them read as arrangements.
The workshops had been described only as public sessions where the work is done in the room rather than described. That left out the point of them. They are where the county’s own help comes from: a few local people given a light introduction to AI who can afterward make a change for a neighbor’s site. Without that, twelve sites are twelve orphans the day the pilot ends.
The same afternoon, after publishing, Walter said he still had deep concerns and asked for a timeline. What came out of it was a private working drawing rather than anything on this page — the whole arc, from before the grant through the pilot year to what happens after — and it surfaced the things this proposal is quietest about: the support gap, the AI subscription ending at month twelve, the domain renewals falling due after everyone has gone home.
A proposal describing twelve websites that do not exist yet is asking for a lot of imagination. The first sample — an invented Washakie County farm, with the county’s real crops, water and rules behind every answer — was built so that there is something to open instead. It sits under gyro-sites.online rather than costing a domain of its own, which is itself an argument the proposal makes.
The same day the family was wired together: a card at the foot of every page pointing one level up, so a reader who arrives at a sample can find the proposal, and a reader here can find the method.
A proposal for an AI pilot program had a $10,000 budget with no line for the AI. Corrected the same night: $1,200 for twelve months, rebalanced inside the ceiling rather than added to it, and the text made true to it — the county subscribes to nothing, and the pilot’s one subscription ends with the pilot.
The opening paragraph was also leading with the ask. It now leads with the thing itself: AI from the ground up, where people live and work — and the $10,000 comes second, where it belongs.
And the sponsor route was worked out properly for the first time: a city grants office exists, the person in it is the one to see before asking for council time, and the state runs a free grant-assistance program for local governments that would help whoever sponsors.
First publish on 16 September. Then the ordinary business of making a page honest: the line claiming the proposal is written in the format it proposes moved out of the opening, where it read as a boast, into its own place where it reads as a fact; every answer set to start closed, so the reader chooses; the source numerals given white discs so they read as controls rather than decoration; and the share card — which had been drawn by hand — turned into a tool that generates one from three fields.