policy-nexus/workplans/POLICY-NEXUS-WP-0001-permanent-publication-surface.md

---
id: POLICY-NEXUS-WP-0001
type: workplan
title: "Stand up policy.coulomb.social as the permanent publication surface"
domain: government
repo: policy-nexus
status: proposed
owner: unassigned
topic_slug: policy-nexus
created: "2026-08-17"
updated: "2026-08-17"
---

# POLICY-NEXUS-WP-0001 — permanent publication surface

## Goal

Replace disposable artifact-page publication with permanent infrastructure at
`policy.coulomb.social` that keeps policy **available**, **addressable**,
**current**, and **honest about its own staleness**.

Done means: a governing document lives in its owning repo, is published
automatically, keeps its URL, shows its status and review date, retains its
superseded versions, and can be reached by someone outside the estate.

## The forcing case

Custodian ADR-008 (*Tenancy Posture*, draft-4) needs review from six repos —
`tenant-engine`, `flex-auth`, `rapp-postgres`, `railiance-platform`,
`adaptive-pricing`, `audit-core`. It is currently served from a private,
disposable artifact URL. Routing a document that governs six repos to a link
that may not resolve later is the problem this workplan exists to end.

ADR-008 is therefore the first publication and the acceptance test. If the site
cannot carry it correctly — five ladders, a threat matrix, an E×P grid, twelve
owner-attributed open questions — the site is not finished.

## Existing structure this workplan must respect

**The renderer already exists in prototype.**
`the-custodian/tools/render-artifact.py` generates the ADR-008 page from canon
markdown: stdlib only, no dependency tree, recognising conventions already
present in the document rather than requiring extra markup. It was written
because the page and the ADR had diverged. **Take it over and generalise it; do
not reimplement it.** Its companion `tools/artifact-style.css` carries the
design system.

**Source of truth stays upstream.** Canon lives in `the-custodian/canon`;
per-repo ADRs live in their own repos. This repo reads and never writes back.
A publication surface with write authority is a second source of truth, and the
estate has a standing rule against that.

**The adoption stance applies** (ADR-008 §14): adopt published standards and
structural patterns; build tooling ground-up unless it is an established
industry standard with broad application. A static-site generator with a
plugin ecosystem is exactly what this rule excludes.

**Platform packages are consumed, not rebuilt.** TLS, DNS, ingress, and any
credential come from the existing platform. If this repo needs storage it is a
`rapp-postgres` consumer and declares a posture vector like anyone else.

## Non-goals

- No editing surface. No CMS, no browser drafting, no comments.
- No ratification workflow. The site may *show* that a draft is in flight and
  for how long; advancing it is a canon-process decision.
- No authentication in this workplan. Everything published here is
  public-by-intent; anything that is not does not belong on this surface.
- No search index in this workplan. Deferred until there is enough content for
  search to beat a good index page.

## Tasks

### T01 — Addressing scheme and permanence contract

Decide, once, how a document maps to a URL, and write down what the estate is
promising about that URL.

- URL shape for a document, and for a specific revision of it.
- What happens on supersession: the old URL keeps resolving and gains a
  superseded banner pointing forward.
- What happens on withdrawal: distinguish *withdrawn* (kept, marked) from
  *deleted* (does not happen).
- Where the version history lives, given the source is git in another repo.
- The commitment being made — a URL published here is expected to resolve
  indefinitely, and what would have to happen for that to be broken.

**Output:** `docs/adr/ADR-0001-addressing-and-permanence.md`.

**Why first:** everything downstream bakes in the answer, and changing it later
breaks the one promise the repo exists to make.

### T02 — Generalise the renderer

Move `render-artifact.py` and `artifact-style.css` in, and lift them from
one-document to many.

- Multi-document: a manifest of sources rather than one path argument.
- Front-matter driven: title, status, revision, review date, owner from the
  source document rather than from command-line flags.
- Index generation: a landing page listing documents with status and currency.
- Keep the convention recognisers (level ladders, threat matrix, E×P grid,
  evidence chips, section rail) and keep it stdlib-only.
- Keep the "generated from canon — do not edit" marker on every page.

**Acceptance:** ADR-008 renders byte-identically in substance to the current
generated page, plus an index entry.

### T03 — Source ingestion

Define how a document gets from its owning repo to this one.

- Manifest format: source repo, path, publication URL, owner.
- **Scope is canon and ADRs only.** The corpus is bounded and countable today:
  two canon trees (`the-custodian/canon`, `net-kingdom/canon`) and roughly 68
  ADRs across 18 repositories. Workplans, evidence and runbooks are out — a
  site that publishes everything publishes nothing in particular. Enumerate the
  actual list during T03; a glob over `docs/adr/*.md` plus the canon trees is
  the starting point, but each canon subdirectory (`standards`, `architecture`,
  `constitution`, `values`, `tpsc`, `projects`) needs a yes or no rather than a
  wildcard.
- Fetch mechanism for documents in other repositories, and how a fetch failure
  is surfaced rather than silently serving stale content.
- Determinism: the same source commit must produce the same page.
- Record the source commit on the published page, so a reader can tell exactly
  what was rendered.

**Open decision for T03:** pull (this repo fetches on a schedule) or push (the
owning repo triggers on merge). Pull is simpler and keeps the direction of
dependency clean; push is fresher. Recommend pull with a manual trigger, and
record the choice.

### T04 — Deploy to policy.coulomb.social

- DNS, TLS, ingress via the existing platform packages.
- Static hosting — the output is static files by construction, so the serving
  layer should be the least interesting part of this workplan.
- Availability expectation stated plainly, with the honest caveat that a
  single-node rail gives restart recovery, not high availability. Do not claim
  an SLA the substrate cannot support.
- Rollback: republishing a previous build must be a single command.
- Smoke check after every deploy: the index resolves, ADR-008 resolves, and a
  known superseded URL still resolves.

### T05 — Currency and staleness

The relevance half of the repo's purpose. A permanently available document that
is quietly out of date is worse than no document.

- Every page shows status, revision, and last-reviewed date.
- A review interval per document, and a visible marker once exceeded.
- A report of documents past review, and where it is delivered.
- Drafts show how long they have been in flight. The
  `shared-platform-relational-storage_v0.1` draft has been routed and
  unratified since 2026-08-10; that fact should be visible on the site, because
  invisibility is precisely why it stalled.

### T06 — Regulatory intake

The information-gathering half, scoped to **regulation bearing on the estate**.
Deliberately last: the publication path must work before a second content type
is added.

**Inclusion test.** A rule is in scope when it constrains something the estate
actually does — governs data it holds, a market it sells into, or an obligation
it has taken on. Public policy that is merely interesting is out. This is a
compliance surface, not a civic-information corpus.

**Record format.** What the source says; the source URL; the date retrieved;
the jurisdiction; the instrument and article or section; which internal
document or decision it bears on; who recorded it; when it should next be
checked.

**The hard rule, written into the format itself:** a record states what a
source said and when it said it. It does **not** state what the estate must
therefore do. Interpretation belongs to the repo making the decision, and a
record that reads as a ruling has failed. The estate has no legal function and
this repo must not grow one by accident.

**Staleness is sharper here than for internal documents.** External policy
changes without telling us, so a record is a dated snapshot, never current law.
The retrieval date is displayed as prominently as the content, and a record
past its check date is visibly stale rather than quietly wrong.

**Candidate register, to confirm rather than assume.** These are the domains
the estate's own activity implies; T06 should verify which actually apply
before treating any as in scope:

| Area | Why the estate touches it | Already live in |
|---|---|---|
| Data protection / erasure and retention | Tenant personal data, the erasure horizon, whether key destruction satisfies an erasure obligation | ADR-008 plane R; `rapp-postgres` ADR-0002 |
| Data residency | The `P4` placement level exists for exactly this and has no occupants yet | ADR-008 plane P |
| Public procurement | `vergabe-teilnahme` is a procurement-participation app and the delivery-lane reference implementation | `business-app-service-contract` |
| Identity assurance | The IAM Profile's `aal2` class drives live re-query rather than cached claims | `iam-profile_v0.3`; ADR-008 plane I |
| Sector and cybersecurity obligations | Whether the estate is an in-scope entity at all is itself an open question worth recording once | — |
| AI and agentic entities | The tenant taxonomy has an `agentic` grouping for financially enabled AI entities | ADR-0013 |

**Worked example already in hand.** The ADR-008 retention research holds a
finding of exactly this shape: data protection authorities have accepted key
destruction as erasure where physical deletion is disproportionate, under
conditions, and the EDPB has not formally endorsed it. True as recorded, likely
to move, and dangerous if ever restated as settled. Migrating that finding into
the T06 format is the acceptance test for the format.

**Acceptance:** the format holds that finding without distortion; the record
displays its retrieval date as prominently as its content; and a reader can get
from a record to the internal document it bears on, and back.

## Sequencing

T01 gates everything. T02 and T03 can proceed in parallel once addressing is
fixed. T04 needs both. T05 is additive. T06 is deliberately last.

The temporary artifact URL for ADR-008 stays live until T04 passes its smoke
check, and the review is routed to the permanent URL, not before.

## Risks

**This repo becomes a second source of truth.** The likeliest failure and the
most damaging. Mitigation: no editing surface, generated pages carry a
do-not-edit marker, and the manifest records the source commit for every page.

**Permanence is promised before it can be delivered.** A URL committed to in
T01 and broken in year two is worse than never having promised. Mitigation:
T01 states what would break the promise, and T04 declines to claim an
availability level the single-node rail cannot support.

**Scope drift toward a CMS.** Every publication surface attracts requests for
editing, comments, and workflow. Mitigation: the non-goals above are part of
the workplan, not a preface to it.

**The renderer grows a dependency tree.** The moment it needs a framework, it
becomes something only CI can run. Mitigation: stdlib-only is an acceptance
criterion on T02, not a preference.

## Resolved by the operator, 2026-08-17

- **Publication scope is canon and ADRs.** Not workplans, evidence, runbooks or
  general documentation. Folded into T03 and INTENT.
- **Intake scope is regulation bearing on the estate.** Not a broader
  public-interest corpus. T06 is specified accordingly, with an inclusion test
  and a candidate register to confirm.

The README's one-line description — "a convergence and publication point for
government policies" — reads broader than this. Worth updating so the repo does
not attract the wrong contributions.

## Open questions for the operator

1. **Owner.** This workplan is `unassigned`. It spans infrastructure and canon
   process and does not obviously belong to an existing repo's agent.
2. **Public by default?** INTENT assumes everything on this surface is
   public-by-intent. Confirm that no estate policy is sensitive enough to need
   an authenticated tier — if any is, that changes T04 substantially. Now
   sharper than when first asked: publishing every ADR across 18 repositories
   exposes the estate's architecture, its known gaps and its residual risks in
   one indexed place. `rapp-postgres` ADR-0001 §5 publishes a blast radius by
   design, and that is the right call for a document its consumers must read —
   but the same disclosure discipline applied estate-wide, publicly, is a
   decision worth taking deliberately rather than inheriting from a default.
3. **Canon subdirectory scope.** `standards` and `architecture` are clearly
   policy. Are `constitution`, `values`, `tpsc` and `projects` in or out? T03
   needs a yes or no per directory rather than a wildcard.