The Office gives public questions and shared work a clear route from inquiry to a reviewed result. It joins research, design, implementation, verification, and public explanation without confusing advice with authority.
Steve is the hinge: Front prepares; Back implements; nothing is approved until he says so.
One Office, two responsibilities
The Front Office researches, organizes, drafts, and reviews. It prepares a decision packet with the ask, evidence, options, risks, constraints, and acceptance conditions.
The Back Office implements an explicitly approved outcome in the project that owns it. It checks the current state, makes a bounded change, verifies the result, and returns evidence.
The names describe responsibilities, not competing teams. A person or tool may help in either office, but each handoff keeps its authority and review boundary.
The shared working loop
- Receive - identify the request, audience, desired result, and constraints.
- Prepare - gather sources, distinguish facts from proposals, and make the decision clear.
- Approve - Steve decides whether the packet may cross into implementation or publication.
- Implement - make the smallest coherent change in the owning project.
- Verify - test the result, inspect what people will see, and record remaining gaps.
- Publish or hand back - release only approved public material and preserve a reviewable source.
What crosses the boundary
A packet going in carries the ask, constraints, stewardship vetoes, and acceptance conditions. A result coming back carries verification evidence and any remaining uncertainty. Every crossing is specific; no packet creates standing permission to publish, contact people, spend money, or change production.
Knowledge and publication
The public Office door is https://office.signwriting.org/. Reviewed public explanations may be published there when Steve authorizes them. Auto-generated method guides on www.sutton-signwriting.io are retired.
Private handbooks retain correspondence, account administration, local systems, recovery procedures, unpublished work, and other operational detail. Public and private editions may share language, but publication is always a deliberate reviewed copy. Private files are never mirrored automatically.
Human authority
Office roles and automated tools may research, organize, challenge, draft, implement, and verify within an approved task. A human remains responsible for decisions, external communication, publication, spending, account creation, commitments, and production changes.