# PDR 008: Publish assessable project narratives without exposing private data

- HTML version: https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/personal-knowledge-graph/pdrs/008-public-project-evidence-boundary
- Project: Personal Knowledge Graph
- Status: Accepted
- Opened: 2026-09-27
- Decided: 2026-09-27

## Context

A connected public account is useful only when its project pages let a reader
judge the work. A polished summary can name a result without exposing the
problem, current scope, decisions, evidence, or unresolved limits behind it.

The graph can also connect private notes and application data, but connection
does not grant publication authority. Personal financial records, household
data, unpublished notes, credentials, and other private material have different
owners and access rules from public project documentation.

## Decision

Public project narratives will state the problem, intended audience, current
boundary, important product and architecture decisions, available delivery or
outcome evidence, and material limits. Link to canonical records rather than
copying their rationale into a status claim.

Keep private notes and application data outside the public graph. A public
project page may describe that a private system or evidence set exists and may
publish an approved aggregate. It must not copy the underlying data into the
repository merely to make the public graph complete.

Publication requires explicit authority over the claim and its evidence. A
relationship discovered by code or an agent remains a proposal until the
owner reviews it for accuracy and disclosure.

## Consequences

Readers receive enough context to distinguish a working result, a proposal,
and an unsupported claim. Projects can still point to private operations
without pretending that public evidence covers them.

Some claims cannot be published with their strongest evidence. Project pages
must state that limitation instead of filling the gap with private data or
vague confidence. Reviewers also need to check disclosure, provenance, and
authority in addition to prose and link validity.

## Evaluation

A reader should be able to identify what the project is trying to do, what is
currently true, which decisions govern it, and what evidence is public. A
repository scan and content review must find no private records copied in to
support that account.

## Migration note

The original project narrative already promised deeper project accounts that
show reasoning and trade-offs. ADR 059 formalised the public/private evidence
boundary and identified this record on 2026-09-27. This migration preserves
that date and policy. It does not broaden what the project publishes.

## Related records

- Project: [Personal Knowledge Graph](https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/personal-knowledge-graph.md)
- Informed by ADR: [ADR 033: In-Memory Content Graph](https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/personal-knowledge-graph/adrs/033-content-graph-indexes.md)
- Informed by ADR: [ADR 058: Model Shared Defaults as Temporal Platform Layers](https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/personal-knowledge-graph/adrs/058-temporal-platform-layers.md)

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