What an engagement actually looks like

1 · Write to me

Use the contact form or email dave@civitassystems.com. The form asks what brings you here — a specific project, ongoing advisory, expert input, collaboration, investment, or speaking — and a few lines about the decision you need to make or defend is the most useful thing you can send. If you have data, don't send it yet; describing it is enough to start.

2 · We scope it

The first conversation is about fit and shape. The engagement formats below are the shapes the work can take, and the right one usually becomes obvious in that first conversation. If I'm not the right person for the problem, I'll say so and, where I can, point you toward who is.

Concretely: send a note describing the problem; I reply within a week; if it sounds like a fit we talk for 20–30 minutes; if we both want to proceed I write a one-page proposal with scope, timeline, and price. There is deliberately no booking link yet. The work-page FAQ covers the same ground.

3 · The shapes an engagement can take

• Advisory hours — methodology consultation, sense-checking, or strategy work. One to ten hours, fixed-fee per hour or session.
• Defined project — a single deliverable: a model, report, dashboard, or pipeline. Usually one to six months, fixed-bid or milestone-based.
• Fractional engagement — methodology-on-call for a startup, research center, or NGO. One to two days per week, ongoing, on a monthly retainer.
• Long engagement — often academic research projects or government work. Multi-month to multi-year, time-and-materials or milestone-based.
• Workshop or training — custom-designed for your team: systems thinking, GHG inventory methodology, network analysis fundamentals. Single-day to multi-day, fixed-fee per engagement.

The services page lists the productized offers — fixed-scope, fixed-price starting points — alongside these formats.

4 · The work itself

Whatever the format, the discipline is the same: every figure traced to its source, methodology audited, results replicable. AI output, where AI is used at all, is treated as a draft and never a conclusion — the AI-use policy describes the verification gates. If you want to see the standard demonstrated on a real published number, that's One number, fully loaded.

5 · What you receive

The deliverable and its provenance: the model, inventory, or analysis, together with the chain that makes it defensible — sources, method, and the soft spots named rather than buried. Tools built for you are yours to keep and run; nothing is locked behind a subscription to me.

See the shape for yourself: a specimen deliverable — real analysis from public sources, in the exact format client work follows.

Confidentiality

Client work is confidential by default; the policies page covers confidentiality, privacy, and accessibility in one place. Nothing appears in my public case studies without permission — which is why some of the strongest work here is described at a higher altitude than I would like.