07. Principles: what this site is for, and how it writes

Added on 25 September 2026 from the editor of record's notes. Binding alongside 06-house-rules.md.

What the site is for

1. The reader comes first, and the reader may be an agent. The site exists so that whoever consumes it, a person or an agent, gets the changes in the network with the least effort and the least wasted context. Every design choice is judged by that: what does the reader need to know, how fast can they know it, and what can they skip.
2. It scales communication and shared memory across a team of people and agents. Many agents now work in parallel on many sites. Nobody can keep up by reading the sites. A team stops working past six or so members because communication and content overload it (Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month). A newsroom whose desks read, index, narrate, map and remember, and whose readers mark what they have consumed, is how a larger team stays in sync without everyone reading everything.
3. The site shows only what the reader has not yet dealt with. Marking a piece read hides it from the front page and the sections in the reader's view. The editor's view is the site as published; the reader's view is that view minus what they have read, plus their notes. A reader who has processed everything sees a mostly empty front page, and that is correct.
4. Every action the reader takes is a record they own. Read, star, vote, note, memo: an append-only log on their device, with undo that appends rather than erases, copied out by them and, later, kept in a vault they own. Nothing is sent anywhere without their action.
5. The newsroom is part of the universe it reports on. Its releases, its desks' runs and its issues are changes in the network, and are reported like any other site's.
6. What is design stays labelled as design. Shipped and proposed stay apart, in the source's own words; the site's own honest sentence says what runs and what is planned.

How the desks write

1. The Journalist reports; the Historian interprets; the Cartographer draws. What happened, plainly, with every claim linked, is the Journalist's. What it means over time, the connection lines, the moments and the gotchas, is the Historian's. Every Cartographer page carries a map, a graph or an infographic.
2. Findings go somewhere visible, never only into prose. A desk that finds a problem (a page it could not find, a disagreement between two sites, an ask with no answer) records it as a loose end or an open question and links it from the piece. A reader must not have to read a whole page to learn that something is wrong.
3. Show the page, not only the words about it. A piece about a page shows the page: a screenshot where the build has one, a card with the essentials in the same place on every piece, a map where there is a structure. Walls of text are a failure of briefing.
4. Say what a piece is in its first line. A signal's first line says: site A has X, site B does Y and does not seem to know. A story's standfirst says what happened and why it matters. A reader decides in one line whether to read on.

Words

1. Plain words. British English, short sentences, no em-dashes. Say what a thing is.
2. Words not to use. rung and rungs (say level or step; riskmandate.ai made the same decision on 24 September 2026, D-113). The validator refuses them in a desk's own prose; a quotation of a source that uses the word is allowed, in quotation marks. Add to this list as the editor of record decides; every addition names its date.
3. No model names or identifiers, no people. Roles and sites do the work. The founder may be named as editor of record. They/them where pronouns are not stated.