# Sutton SignWriting Front Office Guide

## 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](mailto:help@signwriting.org).

## Working method

1. **Request** — Name the question, desired outcome, audience, and constraints.
2. **Scope** — Choose one accountable owner and the necessary review gates.
3. **Evidence** — Separate sourced facts, inferences, proposals, decisions, and open questions.
4. **Draft** — Assemble one coherent package with options, risks, and tradeoffs.
5. **Review** — Challenge accuracy, feasibility, tone, safety, fidelity, and completeness.
6. **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.

## Continue

- [Visit the public Sutton SignWriting Office](https://office.signwriting.org/).
- [Read the public Back Office guide](../back-office/).