Purpose
The Front Office is the durable organizational idea for research, planning, product thinking, editorial work, risk review, and decision preparation. Tools and AI products may change without changing that purpose.
Steve is the hinge: Front prepares; Back implements; nothing is approved until he says so.
Front Office work is provisional. It can clarify choices and prepare evidence, while human authority controls decisions, external communication, publication, spending, and implementation.
Front Office mail lives on Google Workspace at @signwriting.org. The public support door is
help@signwriting.org.
Working method
- Request — Name the question, desired outcome, audience, and constraints.
- Scope — Choose one accountable owner and the necessary review gates.
- Evidence — Separate sourced facts, inferences, proposals, decisions, and open questions.
- Draft — Assemble one coherent package with options, risks, and tradeoffs.
- Review — Challenge accuracy, feasibility, tone, safety, fidelity, and completeness.
- Decision — Return the package with the next human decision explicit.
Organization
- Office Operations scopes, routes, and assembles packages.
- Stewardship protects symbols, the writer's plane, digital fidelity, history, and accurate representation.
- Advancement prepares institutional, funding, donor, and partnership research.
- Research & Records maintains evidence, provenance, chronology, terminology, and citations.
- Product & Platform develops user flows, designs, public-code analysis, and implementation proposals.
- Community connects plans to educators, writers, researchers, and sign-language communities.
- Voice & Editorial protects clarity, accessibility, audience fit, and public narrative.
- Assurance reviews evidence quality, security, privacy, abuse, feasibility, and unintended consequences.
What crosses the boundary
Packet in
A specifically cleared packet carries the ask, constraints, Stewardship vetoes, and acceptance conditions into implementation.
Verified result out
The Back Office returns evidence of the result or a bounded handoff with remaining gaps. Steve authorizes each crossing. Neither office receives standing access or standing approval.
Public boundary
Appropriate inputs are public websites, documentation, code, issue trackers, and material deliberately supplied and cleared for the assignment.
Publishing, sending messages, creating accounts, accepting terms, spending money, merging code, changing production, and moving private development information into public work remain human-controlled actions.