# Collection policy — open-weight reserve

**Status:** foundation  
**Related:** `schema.yaml`, `docs/backup-storage-policy.md`, `INTENT.md`

---

## Purpose

Decide **what** enters the open-weight reserve, **who** may approve it, and
**when** a daily-brief candidate becomes a catalog entry with blobs on backup
storage.

---

## Goals

* Keep a **small, high-leverage** reserve — not a Hugging Face mirror
* Enforce **license and integrity** before download completes
* Match capacity to the backup storage soft quota
* Prefer models that serve axes **B** and **C**, plus strategic **A** open releases

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## Eligibility (must pass all)

1. **Open weights** — weights obtainable under terms that allow offline retention for lab use
2. **Clear license** — SPDX or linkable license text; `allows_offline_retention: true`
3. **Stable provenance** — official org, tagged release, or commit revision (not anonymous drive-by reupload as sole source)
4. **Lab rationale** — written `reason` tied to at least one axis A–D (usually B/C)
5. **Capacity** — estimated size fits under remaining soft quota (see backup storage policy)

Fail any gate → status `rejected` with reason, or never enter catalog.

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## Priority rubric

| Priority | Guidance |
| -------- | -------- |
| **high** | Rare or strategically important; license/access risk of disappearance; uniquely strong for B/C at our hardware class; hard to re-obtain |
| **medium** | Clear lab use within 1–2 quarters; good quality/cost; easy enough to re-download but worth having cold |
| **low** | Nice to have; only collect if quota headroom is large and pull is cheap |

Daily brief **collection candidates** should set a suggested priority; approval may change it.

---

## Approval rule of thumb

| Estimated total size | Approval |
| -------------------- | -------- |
| **< 5 GiB** | Operator or lab agent may collect after license check; catalog entry required before or immediately after |
| **5–40 GiB** | Explicit operator approval (chat, workplan task, or signed catalog `approved_by`) |
| **> 40 GiB** | Operator approval **plus** check against soft quota and whether a smaller quant/variant suffices |
| **Any size if quota ≥ 70% used** | Operator approval required regardless of size |
| **Unclear license or ToS risk** | Do not collect; status `rejected` |

“Operator” means the human lab owner (or a documented delegate). Agents may
**nominate** (`status: candidate`) freely from briefs; they may **collect** only
within the < 5 GiB band when licenses are unambiguous — otherwise stop at
`candidate` / `approved`.

---

## Lifecycle

```text
brief nominates
    → candidate          (catalog YAML, no blobs required)
    → approved           (license + size + quota OK)
    → collecting         (download in staging/)
    → collected          (blobs complete, checksums recorded, storage_path set)
    → verified           (optional re-hash / smoke load)
    → superseded|evicted (replaced or removed; metadata kept)
```

Rejected candidates stay in catalog only if useful as a decision record; otherwise omit.

---

## What we prefer to collect

* Small/mid instruct and code models that fit the hardware envelope
* Strong embedding / rerank models for local RAG
* Base models known to fine-tune well under QLoRA/LoRA on lab GPUs
* Official quant releases when they are the supported distribution
* Adapters and tokenizers that unlock a reserved base (as companions)

## What we usually skip

* Duplicate quants of the same revision already reserved
* Huge models with no near-term local run/train path and no access-risk story
* Merges/repacks without provenance
* Datasets larger than model weights unless separately justified (default: out of band)
* Anything requiring acceptance flows we cannot satisfy offline

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## Companions

Tokenizers, LoRA adapters, and small eval fixtures may be collected when:

* they are required to use a reserved base, or
* they are small (< 1 GiB) and high leverage

Link via `companions` in the catalog schema.

---

## Brief integration

1. Brief section **Collection candidates** nominates items.
2. Operator/agent opens `inventory/catalog/{id}.yaml` with `status: candidate`.
3. Approval and download follow this policy and `docs/backup-storage-policy.md`.
4. Brief `brief_refs` on the entry point back to the nominating day(s).

---

## Eviction rule of thumb

When over quota or cleaning:

1. `low` priority, easily re-obtainable from still-live official URLs
2. Superseded revisions with a newer `verified` replacement
3. Never silent-delete: set `status: evicted`, clear or note `storage_path`, append `history`

---

## Non-goals

* Automatic bulk mirrors of entire orgs
* Collecting on every brief mention without priority
* Bypassing license gates for “research only” convenience