Reader Journey Gate Escalation

Purpose

This page is the Internal Knowledge workstream’s bounded operator guidance for Lee and current company operators. Use it when a required reader journey may be impossible to satisfy, and use the threshold narrowly: escalation is appropriate only after the available product repair route has been exhausted and the remaining failure is a proven authority or platform capability gap. This page records a product conclusion and a decision request; it does not grant authority, change governance, or imply that a publication transition has occurred.

Prove Unsatisfiability

Name the exact journey and its required observable result before drawing a conclusion. Read sources/authority.json first, then match every listed source ID in registries/sources.json by locator, revision, digest, and public-safe disclosure. Record the bounded repairs attempted, the exact product evidence produced by each attempt, and the unresolved authority or platform blocker. The proof is complete only when it explains why product content, registration, source references, or projection work cannot repair that blocker and identifies the smallest decision or advice Lee must provide. An unresolved fact is evidence to retain, not permission to fill a gap with inference.

Do Not Escalate Repairable Defects

Treat malformed journey data, missing page registration, broken source references, insufficient section content, and stale deterministic projection as bounded product defects. Repair the affected content, registration, source reference, or projection; rebuild the projection; and rerun the declared product check, retaining the failed observation beside the later result. A passing repair is evidence about the product route only. Missing publication, promotion, rollback, or platform-attestation evidence is not by itself proof that the reader journey is unsatisfiable, and none of those boundaries may be crossed to manufacture an escalation result.

Evidence for Lee

The decision packet should contain the journey ID and goal, the source mapping, the attempted repair record, the remaining blocker, and the smallest proposed decision. The approved source mapping for this workstream is source.naming-decision at factory:decisions.md#Governed Execution Documentation Steward naming and route, revision 2026-08-02, digest 7c42ccc9f454a81e2c119c14cdc3ad5ba30ef54d27fb6a8b371c7a640eb54dd2, source.documentation-boundary at product:architecture.md#Semantic source, revision 2026-08-04, digest 0094e6f534a04729008a3c85510899e5022cbd18a0f7ac9302b19f0c3ba29f76, and source.platform-delivery-contract at agent-orch:docs/delivery-profile-contract.md#content, revision agent-orch-main-e65a64fcf429, digest d466a6dca8420477f416a535c9c2bd76aa314fb5e67d72d405b12e6386a9573b. Keep Lee’s request separate from product conclusions: an evaluator may state whether the threshold is met, while platform-owned gate evidence and any authority decision remain with their owners. If the proof is incomplete, ask for nothing and record no escalation; retain the candidate-only boundary and all publication state unchanged.

Acceptance Checks

• AC-1 — Prove the authority or platform blocker: The record names the exact reader journey, preserves its required result and source mapping, and identifies the unresolved authority or platform capability gap together with evidence that the gap cannot be repaired within the product content surface. It does not treat an absent attestation or an unperformed publication transition as proof of unsatisfiability.
• AC-2 — Rule out bounded repairable defects: The record shows that malformed journey data, missing registration, broken source references, insufficient content, and stale projection were checked and repaired or otherwise excluded, with failed observations retained beside later product results. A repair result remains product evidence and is not promoted into platform authority.
• AC-3 — Provide Lee a minimal evidence-backed decision request: Only when AC-1 and AC-2 are satisfied, the packet asks Lee for the smallest named decision or advice needed to resolve the proven blocker, links that request to the retained evidence, and states the reversible no-escalation outcome when the proof is absent. The request implies no approval, promotion, publication, scheduling, rollback, pointer change, or live-directory write.