Disclosure tier

One word on every item saying who may read it — so a door can open the right things to the right people without anyone having to ask.

Everything a body writes carries a tier: this page is open to the world, this one is for the people who have crossed the threshold, this one is held close. The tier is written on the item itself rather than kept in a list somewhere, which is what makes it survive being copied, printed, handed over, or read by a program that has never met the person who wrote it.

It is load-bearing because openness and care are both real obligations and they pull against each other. A body that publishes everything betrays whoever trusted it with something tender; a body that publishes nothing cannot be joined, checked, or learned from. The tier is how both are kept at once: the default leans open, the exceptions are named, and the naming is visible so it can be argued with. A hidden thing whose hiding is itself hidden is the shape every closed system takes, and the tier is the small structural refusal of it (Requirement Of Transparency, Control Of Information).

The tier is also what a door renders by. A page that greets a stranger shows the open tier; the same surface, entered by a member, shows more; nothing anywhere has to be duplicated into two copies that drift apart. The same field lets a Cell hand its whole record to another Cell and know exactly what crossed (Minimum standards of interoperability, Selectively Permeable Membrane).

Two disciplines keep it from becoming a filing habit. A tier is set by whoever holds the thing, and raised only with the consent of whoever it concerns — a person's own particulars are theirs, and no body may make them public by reclassification (Consent, Sovereignty). And a tier is reviewed like any other decision: what was sensitive in one season is often ordinary in the next, and a body that never lowers anything is hoarding rather than protecting.

Also called: the disclosure field · who may read this Stands on: Consent · Sovereignty · Requirement Of Transparency · Selectively Permeable Membrane Opens onto: The door · Chatham House · Minimum standards of interoperability · Terms · Guard the Membrane · Control Of Information In play: the door — read before anything is shown, written on everything that is made Sources: Projects/The Kit 2026-09/The Minimum Standards of Interoperability — What a Holon Carries to Be a Cell (the Kit, v0), the disclosure-tier row (draft) · Disclosure Tiers of a Holon — Term Page and Field Spec (named in that row; the spec itself is held outside the canon) · lionsberg.wiki: Minimum Standards of Interoperability Open: The tiers are named in the canon only by example — open, community-trust, close-held — and no page fixes the set, the words, or who may change an item's tier after it has been handed to someone else.