tegwick
db5b310853
policy.coulomb.social replaces disposable artifact-page publication. The repo has two halves - publishing estate policy outward, and gathering external policy inward - and one standing constraint: it reads from the repos that own policy and never writes back, so it cannot become a second source of truth. WP-0001 is scoped by a forcing case. ADR-008 needs review from six repos and is currently served from a private URL that may not resolve later. It is both the first publication and the acceptance test: if the site cannot carry five ladders, a threat matrix, an E x P grid and twelve owner-attributed questions, the site is not finished. T01 fixes addressing and the permanence promise before anything is built, because changing it later breaks the one thing this repo exists to guarantee. T02 takes over the renderer that already exists in the-custodian rather than reimplementing it - stdlib-only is an acceptance criterion, not a preference. T06 is deliberately last and carries a hard rule: a gathered record says what a source said and when, never what the estate must therefore do. Four questions left open for the operator, including who owns this and whether "government policies" in the README means regulation bearing on the estate or a broader public corpus. T06 cannot be specified until that is answered. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
105 lines
5.4 KiB
Markdown
105 lines
5.4 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, kept current, and gathered from the outside
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world. It serves `policy.coulomb.social`.
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Before this repo existed, policy lived in two bad places.
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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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**Incoming policy was nowhere.** Government and regulatory policy that bears on
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what the estate may do — data protection, procurement rules, sector regulation
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— was consulted ad hoc, at the moment somebody needed it, and never retained.
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The same question was researched more than once, and the answer was never
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recorded against the decision it informed. ADR-008's retention plane is a live
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example: whether key destruction satisfies an erasure obligation is a question
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about external policy that the estate answered in a research digest and has no
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mechanism to keep current when the position moves.
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This repo exists so that policy has a permanent address, a known freshness, and
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a path in as well as out.
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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.** Rendering governing documents from their
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source repos into a durable, addressable, indexed site. The source of truth
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stays in the owning repo; this repo owns the *publication*, not the content.
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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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- **Information gathering.** The intake path for external policy: what was
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found, when, from where, and which internal decision it bears on.
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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: Custodian ADR-008
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(*Tenancy Posture*), 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 (`the-custodian/tools/render-artifact.py`) is a prototype
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of what this repo generalises — and taking it over rather than reimplementing
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it is the intended path.
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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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