policy-nexus/INTENT.md

# INTENT — policy-nexus

## Why this repo exists

`policy-nexus` is the permanent home for the estate's **policy surface**: the
place where policy is published, kept current, and gathered from the outside
world. It serves `policy.coulomb.social`.

Before this repo existed, policy lived in two bad places.

**Published policy was temporary.** Documents that other people needed to read
were pushed to disposable artifact pages — private URLs, no index, no history,
no guarantee the link resolves next month. A document that governs how six
repos behave cannot be delivered as a link that might expire. The estate has
already been bitten by the adjacent failure: a canon draft routed for
ratification on 2026-08-10 sat unratified in neither canon directory because
nothing tracked that it was in flight.

**Incoming policy was nowhere.** Government and regulatory policy that bears on
what the estate may do — data protection, procurement rules, sector regulation
— was consulted ad hoc, at the moment somebody needed it, and never retained.
The same question was researched more than once, and the answer was never
recorded against the decision it informed. ADR-008's retention plane is a live
example: whether key destruction satisfies an erasure obligation is a question
about external policy that the estate answered in a research digest and has no
mechanism to keep current when the position moves.

This repo exists so that policy has a permanent address, a known freshness, and
a path in as well as out.

## What it owns

- **`policy.coulomb.social`** — the public publication surface: its
  infrastructure, deployment, availability and rollback.
- **Publication of estate policy.** Rendering governing documents from their
  source repos into a durable, addressable, indexed site. The source of truth
  stays in the owning repo; this repo owns the *publication*, not the content.
- **Stable addressing.** A published document keeps its URL. Superseded
  versions remain reachable and are marked superseded rather than removed.
- **Currency.** Every published document carries its status, revision, and when
  it was last reviewed. A stale document is visibly stale rather than silently
  wrong.
- **Information gathering.** The intake path for external policy: what was
  found, when, from where, and which internal decision it bears on.
- **The relevance loop.** Detecting when a published or gathered document has
  gone out of date, and surfacing that rather than waiting for someone to
  notice.

## What it does not own

- **The content of estate policy.** Canon lives in `the-custodian`; per-repo
  ADRs live in their repos. This repo publishes what those own and must never
  become a second place where policy is edited. The local-files-are-source-of-
  truth rule applies with full force: if the site and the source disagree, the
  source is right and the publication is a defect.
- **Ratification.** Whether a draft becomes canon is a canon-process decision.
  This repo can show that a draft is in flight and how long it has been; it
  cannot advance it.
- **Legal advice.** Gathered external policy is recorded with its source and
  date. Interpreting what it requires of the estate is the owning repo's
  decision, informed by the record, and the record must not read as a ruling.
- **Identity, authorization, storage, secrets.** Consumed from the platform
  packages, never reimplemented.
- **Being a CMS.** No editing surface, no drafting in a browser. Documents
  arrive from repositories.

## Permanence is the point

The word doing the work in this repo's purpose is *permanent*. It sets
requirements that a temporary page does not have:

- **A URL that resolves in five years.** Addressing is a design decision made
  once and then honoured, not a consequence of whatever generated the page.
- **History that survives.** A superseded policy is part of the record. Anyone
  asking "what did this say when we made that decision" must be able to find
  out.
- **Availability that is somebody's job.** If policy governs behaviour, policy
  being unreachable is an incident, not an inconvenience.
- **Generated, never authored.** Every page is derived from a source document
  in a repository. Nothing is hand-written into the site, because hand-written
  content diverges from its source — a failure this estate has already had
  once, between an ADR and its published page, and fixed by generating the page
  from the markdown.

## Relationship to the rest of the estate

`policy-nexus` is downstream of every repo that owns policy and upstream of
nobody. It reads; it does not write back. That direction is deliberate: a
publication surface with write authority becomes a second source of truth, and
the estate has a standing rule against exactly that.

The first content it must carry is already waiting: Custodian ADR-008
(*Tenancy Posture*), which needs to reach six reviewing repos and is currently
served from a disposable artifact URL. The renderer that produces that page
from canon markdown (`the-custodian/tools/render-artifact.py`) is a prototype
of what this repo generalises — and taking it over rather than reimplementing
it is the intended path.

## What good looks like

A person outside the estate can find the policy that governs a decision, see
when it was last reviewed, read the version that was current at any past date,
and tell at a glance whether it is ratified or in flight. A person inside the
estate never asks "where is the current version of that" and never has to be
told "the link expired".