§01 — Shaip
The hardest part of using AI in policy work isn't the technology.
It's making the right knowledge available, at the right time, in a way your team can use and trust.
Shaip is a human-guided AI knowledge assistant built for policy teams. It helps organisations prepare, organise, and maintain the knowledge that AI needs to produce reliable and defensible outputs. Your knowledge remains under your control, available when you need it, and portable across the tools and platforms you choose to use.
§02 — The problem
Policy teams in public-interest organisations work under constant pressure to provide high-stakes advice with limited resources and little margin for error.
AI offers enormous potential, but only when the right information is available, well organised, and connected to the task at hand. Without this foundation, teams spend valuable time searching for documents, checking outputs, and managing uncertainty about whether AI-generated content can be trusted.
Have you experimented with general-purpose AI tools only to find that they introduce new risks, create more work, or produce answers that cannot be confidently defended?
This is the problem Shaip was created to solve.
§03 — How Shaip works
Knowledge preparation
Reliable AI begins with well-prepared knowledge. Shaip helps teams organise, curate, and maintain the information that AI relies on to produce useful outputs. By preparing knowledge before it is needed, organisations can generate more reliable responses, reduce duplication of effort, and maintain a clear record of where information came from and how it was used.
Local and sovereign
Your documents remain under your control. Shaip is designed to run on your own infrastructure or within enterprise environments, supporting organisations with strict privacy, security, and governance requirements.
Portable knowledge
Your knowledge belongs to you, not a platform. Shaip works alongside the AI tools you already use, allowing knowledge accumulated during a project to remain accessible long after the project ends or technology vendors change.
Shaip is being developed by policy, research, and technology professionals through real-world projects and engagements. We understand the governance, accountability, and evidence requirements that public-interest organisations operate under because we have worked within those environments ourselves.
Shaip builds on the Living Repository ↗, an open-source knowledge management prototype developed by a student team at the University of Tasmania. Their work informed Shaip’s technical foundation, and we are grateful for that contribution. Our commitment is to develop and maintain Shaip as open-source software — accessible to the organisations and communities it is built for.