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: infotech
repo: policy-nexus
status: proposed
owner: the-custodian
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superseded versions, and can be reached by someone outside the estate.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

`net-kingdom/canon/standards/tenancy-posture_v0.1.md` (*Tenancy Posture*,
draft-5) 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.

Tenancy Posture 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 is already here.** `tools/render.py` and `tools/style.css`
arrived from `the-custodian` on 2026-08-17, along with `make build`. 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 source had diverged. T02 generalises it from one document to many; it
does not start from scratch.

**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** (Tenancy Posture §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

Lift `tools/render.py` 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:** Tenancy Posture 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, Tenancy Posture 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 — withdrawn

Regulatory intake moved to `risk-nexus` on 2026-08-17. Deciding what a rule
demands of the estate is a judgement about risk, not an act of publishing, and
it wanted a different owner and a different skill from everything above.

`risk-nexus` publishes *through* this repo. When it has records to publish they
arrive as another source in the T03 manifest, not as a second content type this
repo curates.

The consequence is the point: **this repo now does one thing.** Publication,
permanence, currency. That makes its ownership answerable and its boundary
defensible.

## 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 Tenancy Posture 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.
- **Owner is `the-custodian`**, which owns both policy and risk, and carries
  the duty of deciding what must be discussed with the operator personally.
- **Regulatory intake left the repo.** It is `risk-nexus`'s (T06, withdrawn).

**Authority is three-way and stated, not held by one repo.** `policy-nexus`
owns the surface — addressing, permanence, rendering, currency.
`the-custodian` owns what counts as canon and when it is ratified; this repo
renders that judgement and never makes it, which is the guard against a
cross-repo reader accreting authority over "what is current".
`railiance-platform` owns the substrate — DNS, TLS, ingress, hosting.

The tell that the split is right: **T01 and T04 need different competences.**
T01 is a canon-process question — what supersession means, what a permanent URL
promises. T04 is infrastructure. A single owner would be weak at one.

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. **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.

## Deferred: controlled disclosure

**Resolved for now (operator, 2026-08-17): full public disclosure is fine.** The
estate is in build mode, not production. Publishing architecture, known gaps and
residual risks openly costs little while there are no users to expose and no
attacker with anything to gain.

**That stops being true at production.** ADR-0001 §5 publishes a blast radius
because its consumers must read it; the same discipline applied publicly, once
real tenant data exists, hands an attacker a map. The estate will then need a
**controlled-disclosure scheme**: a way to hold a finding while it is fixed, and
publish it once it is — embargo, coordinated timing, and a record that the delay
was deliberate rather than a document quietly going missing.

This workplan does **not** build that, and should not. Two reasons:

1. It is a different problem. Publication is about permanence and currency;
   embargo is about risk assessment, severity and timing. Building embargo into
   a publication surface would put risk judgement in the repo least qualified to
   make it.
2. It likely belongs to a service of its own — a **`risk-nexus`**, by analogy —
   owning finding intake, severity, remediation tracking and disclosure timing,
   with this repo as its publication surface rather than its brain.

**What T01 must do about it now:** nothing more than leave room. The addressing
scheme should not assume every document is public from the moment it exists, so
that adding an embargo state later is a new status rather than a URL migration.
Recording that constraint costs nothing today and is expensive to retrofit.

**Trigger to revisit:** the first real tenant, or the first finding that would
be dangerous to publish before it is fixed — whichever comes first.