Method & Governance

Governance

*Living Atlas — governance policy, published per architecture §8. Written before it was needed. Four sections; each is short on purpose.*

1. Editorial independence

The Atlas documents consequential public decisions; it does not campaign about them. It holds open questions open, endorses nothing, opposes nothing, and imputes no motive to any person — individuals appear only in their public capacities, sourced to public documents. Its editorial control is not for sale, not for rent, and not available to any funder, subject, or ally. Where the record supports two readings, the Atlas preserves both and says so.

2. Funding disclosure

Every dollar source behind the Atlas will be named here, including any public-body or economic-development money that reaches the separate Gulf Cluster Brief. This project is founder-funded exclusively: a personal Claude Max subscription, domain registration, and incidental compute costs. No outside money, no sponsors, no institutional support. (Disclosure as of 2026-08-09; any change will be recorded as a dated append, never an edit, per the corrections policy.)

3. The two-brand firewall

The Atlas (this record, this site) and the Gulf Cluster Brief (a separate, promotional publication) share a documentary corpus and nothing else. Separate repositories, separate names, separate voices. Nothing promotional lives in this repository or speaks in the Atlas's voice; the Brief reads the public data the same way anyone else does. Stated plainly: the neutral record is the asset, and it is walled off from anything that sells.

4. Corrections policy — and the founding example

Corrections are appended with a date; nothing is silently rewritten. Git history is the audit trail, and every published page renders original claims beside their dated corrections rather than merging them.

The founding example is the record's own: **Portfolio Synthesis v1 → v1.1 (July 2026).** The synthesis over-generalized from a curated corpus — reading a Port-of-Pensacola cluster as evidence about Triumph Gulf Coast's whole portfolio — and the human reviewer caught it. The correction was appended, dated, with the original preserved above it, and the corrected scope now governs every portfolio-level claim. A second correction followed the same path (v1.2, August 2026: a wage floor attributed to the wrong instrument, caught by extracting the instrument itself). The method caught its own author, twice. That is the credibility story, and this policy exists so it keeps happening in the open.

The machinery

The record is plain text in a public repository: markdown extraction runs, a YAML source registry with SHA-256 hashes, an immutable document archive, and generated JSON contracts (graph, sources, docket). A validation gate checks every citation, hash, and ID on every change. This site is a disposable view; the record is not.