The horizon

A stage is a named position a publisher’s own record places a document in. Six are listed here — forming, consultation, draft, final, effective, transition — and for each one, how many records in the signal store carry a publisher token that names it.

A stage is read from a source’s own category tokens and from nothing else — never from a title, never from an address, never from the section a listing sits in, and never from the status this record holds for a tracked entry. Status and stage are different axes with different referents: a status is what this record holds about a document it observes, and a stage is what one listing said about one item it listed.

What the store holds

No read has been attempted against any declared source, so no stage below has been measured. state/signals/ holds no meta file for any of the 2 source(s) this record declares. Every zero in the table that follows is an unasked question, not a source that named no stage.

The six stages

All 6 are listed, in the order they were filed, including those the store holds nothing for. A stage with no member keeps its place: a row built only where membership exists disappears the day the membership does, and a reader cannot tell that from a stage nobody ever named.

Every count above is drawn from the same population: the 0 record(s) this reader could read. No record in that population carries a token naming a stage, so every figure in the middle column is a zero taken over the six and the right-hand column is empty.

What a stage reading can be, other than a stage

An absent stage is not one fact. These are the states a reading lands in, over the same population as the table above.

• No reading has been taken, because the store holds no record at all. This is an empty list rather than a list of zeros: a zero beside each state would report that the states were measured and none matched, and none was measured. The paragraph above names which zero the store is.

Records naming a stage

No record in the store carries a token naming one of the 6 stages. The paragraph above names which zero that is, and the Observatory names it per source; a zero here is not one fact.

What this page publishes, and what it does not

• The population is the signal store under state/signals/, read by the same reader /signals uses. No figure here is derived from an observation, and no signal is one.
• No number expresses a stage. There is no percentage complete, no rank, no weight and no distance from one stage to another. The order of the six is the order the chair filed, published beside the table so it is never left to be inferred.
• A stage is never derived. Where a source states no token that names one of the six, no stage is published for that record at all. Nothing here is filled in from the status this record holds for a tracked entry, from a document title, or from an address.
• The fold has one home and this page reads it. The rule scripts/signals_store.py already uses for the signal classes is the rule a stage token is folded by, read out of that file rather than restated here — no stemming, no plural fold, no substring and no synonym: a publisher’s whole stated token has to name the stage after case and separator folding, or the record says the publisher stated tokens and none of them names one of the six.
• Two stages on one record are kept as two. Where a source’s own tokens name more than one, both are listed and neither is preferred; choosing between them would be this record ranking a source’s own values against each other.
• A title is the source’s own text and is held under the 14-word ceiling read from scripts/quote_cap.py. A longer one is withheld with its reason and never trimmed: a truncated quote is a misquote.

The dated side of this store is on the calendar, beside the dated events that primary sources published. What a signal carries there is the day a source dated its own listing entry — a publication date, and not the date of anything scheduled.

Last updated: 18 September 2026