tegwick
cac0301866
Authority is three-way and stated rather than held by one repo: policy-nexus owns the surface, the-custodian owns what counts as canon and when it is ratified, railiance-platform owns the substrate. The middle one is the guard against the real hazard here - a repo that reads every other repo is one step from becoming the place where "what is current" is decided, and this says plainly that it renders that judgement rather than making it. The tell that the split is right is that T01 and T04 need different competences. T01 asks what supersession means and what a permanent URL promises; T04 is DNS and ingress. One owner would be weak at one of them. T06 withdrawn. Regulatory intake is risk work, not publishing work, and it wanted a different owner and a different skill from everything else in this workplan. risk-nexus publishes through here, arriving as another manifest source rather than as a second content type this repo curates. The consequence is the point: this repo now does one thing, which is what made its ownership answerable. Domain corrected from government, a leftover from when this looked like a civic policy site. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
107 lines
5.5 KiB
Markdown
107 lines
5.5 KiB
Markdown
# INTENT — policy-nexus
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## Why this repo exists
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`policy-nexus` is the permanent home for the estate's **policy surface**: the
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place where policy is published and kept current. It serves
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`policy.coulomb.social`, and is **owned by `the-custodian`**.
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It does one thing. Gathering policy from the outside world was originally
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scoped here and moved to `risk-nexus` on 2026-08-17 — judging what an external
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rule demands of the estate is risk work, not publishing work.
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Before this repo existed, published policy lived in a bad place.
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**Published policy was temporary.** Documents that other people needed to read
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were pushed to disposable artifact pages — private URLs, no index, no history,
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no guarantee the link resolves next month. A document that governs how six
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repos behave cannot be delivered as a link that might expire. The estate has
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already been bitten by the adjacent failure: a canon draft routed for
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ratification on 2026-08-10 sat unratified in neither canon directory because
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nothing tracked that it was in flight.
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This repo exists so that policy has a permanent address and a known freshness.
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## What it owns
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- **`policy.coulomb.social`** — the public publication surface: its
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infrastructure, deployment, availability and rollback.
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- **Publication of estate policy**, scoped to **canon and architecture decision
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records**. Rendering governing documents from their source repos into a
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durable, addressable, indexed site. The source of truth stays in the owning
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repo; this repo owns the *publication*, not the content.
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The corpus in scope today is bounded and countable: two canon trees
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(`the-custodian/canon`, `net-kingdom/canon`) and roughly 68 ADRs across 18
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repositories. Workplans, evidence, runbooks and general documentation are
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**out of scope** — this is a policy site, not a documentation site. That line
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is deliberate: a site that publishes everything publishes nothing in
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particular, and the value here is that a reader knows what governs and what
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merely describes.
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- **Stable addressing.** A published document keeps its URL. Superseded
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versions remain reachable and are marked superseded rather than removed.
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- **Currency.** Every published document carries its status, revision, and when
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it was last reviewed. A stale document is visibly stale rather than silently
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wrong.
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- **Publication for `risk-nexus`.** Regulatory records and publishable findings
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arrive as another source in the manifest. This repo renders and hosts them;
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it does not decide what they mean or when they may be seen.
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- **The relevance loop.** Detecting when a published or gathered document has
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gone out of date, and surfacing that rather than waiting for someone to
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notice.
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## What it does not own
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- **The content of estate policy.** Canon lives in `the-custodian`; per-repo
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ADRs live in their repos. This repo publishes what those own and must never
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become a second place where policy is edited. The local-files-are-source-of-
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truth rule applies with full force: if the site and the source disagree, the
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source is right and the publication is a defect.
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- **Ratification.** Whether a draft becomes canon is a canon-process decision.
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This repo can show that a draft is in flight and how long it has been; it
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cannot advance it.
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- **Legal advice.** Gathered external policy is recorded with its source and
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date. Interpreting what it requires of the estate is the owning repo's
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decision, informed by the record, and the record must not read as a ruling.
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- **Identity, authorization, storage, secrets.** Consumed from the platform
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packages, never reimplemented.
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- **Being a CMS.** No editing surface, no drafting in a browser. Documents
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arrive from repositories.
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## Permanence is the point
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The word doing the work in this repo's purpose is *permanent*. It sets
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requirements that a temporary page does not have:
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- **A URL that resolves in five years.** Addressing is a design decision made
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once and then honoured, not a consequence of whatever generated the page.
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- **History that survives.** A superseded policy is part of the record. Anyone
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asking "what did this say when we made that decision" must be able to find
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out.
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- **Availability that is somebody's job.** If policy governs behaviour, policy
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being unreachable is an incident, not an inconvenience.
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- **Generated, never authored.** Every page is derived from a source document
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in a repository. Nothing is hand-written into the site, because hand-written
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content diverges from its source — a failure this estate has already had
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once, between an ADR and its published page, and fixed by generating the page
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from the markdown.
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## Relationship to the rest of the estate
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`policy-nexus` is downstream of every repo that owns policy and upstream of
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nobody. It reads; it does not write back. That direction is deliberate: a
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publication surface with write authority becomes a second source of truth, and
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the estate has a standing rule against exactly that.
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The first content it must carry is already waiting: NetKingdom's *Tenancy
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Posture* standard, which needs to reach six reviewing repos and is currently
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served from a disposable artifact URL. The renderer that produces that page
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from canon markdown now lives here as `tools/render.py`.
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## What good looks like
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A person outside the estate can find the policy that governs a decision, see
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when it was last reviewed, read the version that was current at any past date,
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and tell at a glance whether it is ratified or in flight. A person inside the
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estate never asks "where is the current version of that" and never has to be
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told "the link expired".
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