Responsible Use & Public Access Guide

1. Human-review controls

Three gates stand between a registry edit and a public page, and a person holds each one:

1. The record gate — publicationStatus reaches published only by a reviewer's decision; the pipeline enforces the release bar (story, outcomes, provenance) but never advances a status itself.
2. The change gate — every registry edit is a commit; reviewed changes are the working mode, and the version history is the public audit trail.
3. The deployment gate — the publish job runs only where a person has enabled publication in the hosting configuration. Until then the pipeline validates and builds but releases nothing.

The rule the three gates share: a person publishes, never an automated process.

2. Permitted uses

Professional review of the architecture; planning and methodology evaluation; public information about the demonstration; adaptation of the structure (schema, gate, pipeline, provenance pattern) to real programs by the offices that own those programs, under their own authority and review.

3. Prohibited uses

• Treating any sample record, figure, organization, or story as real, or citing sample figures outside their demonstration context.
• Representing this demonstration as a government system, or implying agency adoption, endorsement, or partnership.
• Using the portal — or any real system built on this pattern — to make or justify funding, eligibility, zoning, staffing, enforcement, or permitting decisions. Screening views identify items for further professional review; they decide nothing.
• Publishing derived or extrapolated figures as if they were reported outcomes.

4. Information boundaries

• Only published records appear — in pages, feeds, and the machine-readable projection alike. Held records surface only as counts.
• The registry carries no personal information, no financial system of record, and no pre-decisional program material; it must never be extended to do so.
• Stewardship narratives are the awardee's voice, released with their record; field observations aggregate before they publish.
• The State's systems remain the authoritative source for every fact; disagreement is a registry defect by definition.

5. Versioning and release readiness

The schema, the toolkit documents, and the portal carry explicit versions; release notes accompany every versioned release. The v0 schema structurally requires sample: true on every cohort and record — real data cannot validate against it, so the demonstration boundary is enforced by the validator, not by good intentions. Lifting that guard is a deliberate, versioned schema change with its own release note and review.

Release readiness checklist: schema and invariants green in CI · publication gate exercised (held records verified absent from pages and feeds) · provenance chain present on every page · claims-and-boundaries notice present on every page and export · accessibility checks passed · release note written.

6. Accessibility

The portal targets WCAG 2.1 AA, consistent with the State of Hawaiʻi's EIT accessibility standards: semantic landmarks and headings, skip navigation, keyboard-visible focus, AA contrast, table captions and scoped headers, and no information conveyed by color alone. Accessibility findings are release blockers, not backlog items.

7. Public access

The portal, its registry, its schema, and its pipeline are published as open, inspectable artifacts — transparency architecture that is itself transparent. The machine-readable published projection (registry/FY2026.published.json) is the supported public data surface; consumers should read from it rather than scraping pages.