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, scoped to canon and architecture decision records. 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.

  The corpus in scope today is bounded and countable: two canon trees (the-custodian/canon, net-kingdom/canon) and roughly 68 ADRs across 18 repositories. Workplans, evidence, runbooks and general documentation are out of scope — this is a policy site, not a documentation site. That line is deliberate: a site that publishes everything publishes nothing in particular, and the value here is that a reader knows what governs and what merely describes.

• 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 Superseded versions remain reachable and are marked superseded rather than removed.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, scoped to regulation bearing on the estate. The intake path for external policy: what was found, when, from where, and which internal decision it bears on.

  The test for inclusion is whether a rule constrains something the estate actually does. A regulation that governs data the estate holds, a market it sells into, or an obligation it takes on is in scope. Public policy that is merely interesting is not. This is not a civic-information corpus; it is the estate's own compliance surface, kept in one place so the same question is not researched twice and its answer does not silently expire.

• 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".