{"schema_version":1,"assessment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_opportunity320_20260801","source_experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_full320_20260801","cell_id":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management__public_administration_policy","archetype_slug":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management","domain_slug":"public_administration_policy","title":"Authoritative lifecycle controls for obsolete administrative policy stacks","opportunity_summary":"Establish explicit, owner-authorized lifecycle states, dependency checks, holds, redirects, audit trails, and continuing review triggers for administrative instruments so obsolete material loses operational visibility without metadata being mistaken for legal revocation or required records being erased. The proposal is structurally testable, but the prevalence of material confusion, comparative effectiveness, implementation burden, and distinctiveness from existing policy and records practices remain unverified.","adopter_authorizer":"A participating agency program and its legally designated policy owners would adopt the workflow; records, legal, privacy, archival, and potentially oversight authorities would authorize preservation, destruction, holds, and applicable exceptions.","scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":3,"rationale":"The candidate identifies consequential errors—outdated requirements, conflicting public instructions, and impaired accountability—but supplies no evidence about how frequently these occur or how much burden they create in a representative agency."},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":2,"rationale":"Policy owners, frontline staff, the public, and control functions are clearly affected, but the packet contains no expressed demand, committed agency partner, budget signal, complaint evidence, or demonstrated willingness to change workflows."},"incremental_advantage":{"score":4,"rationale":"Compared with periodic office-level cleanup and one-time consolidation, continuing lifecycle states, review triggers, dependency and hold gates, durable redirects, and restore testing offer a clear mechanism for preventing recurrence; the size of the resulting improvement is unmeasured."},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"The integration of operational status governance with legal authority separation, archival controls, redirects, and continuous review is coherent and potentially differentiating, but prior art is explicitly unsearched and may already contain much of this design."},"technical_implementability":{"score":4,"rationale":"A non-production inventory, version resolution process, status catalog, audit log, and retrieval comparison can be built with ordinary information-management capabilities. Broader implementation becomes harder where owners, dependencies, and controlling authority cannot be resolved."},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"The candidate identifies the policy owner and required records, legal, privacy, and archival approvals, making an authorization path conceivable. Feasibility is constrained by potentially decentralized ownership, cross-program dependencies, and instrument-specific legal limits."},"evidence_readiness":{"score":4,"rationale":"The packet provides a bounded 30-instrument review, explicit problem and intervention falsifiers, non-destructive constraints, and rollback conditions. Reviewer-reliability measures, success thresholds, sampling details, and outcome instruments still need definition."},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":4,"rationale":"Durable redirect markers, preservation holds, audit logs, restore tests, prior-visibility rollback, and prohibitions on automatic revocation or premature destruction provide substantial safeguards against erroneous retirement. Their effectiveness has not yet been tested."},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"Common lifecycle states and controls could be reused across policy families, but authoritative classification is likely labor-intensive and must accommodate different laws, repositories, owners, dependencies, and archival obligations."}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"10K_TO_50K","scope":"One program's non-production inventory of one bounded policy family, stratified review of 30 instruments, dual-reviewer status and dependency assessment, and a baseline-versus-prototype guidance-retrieval exercise.","confidence":"MODERATE","assumptions":["The agency supplies repository access and knowledgeable policy, records, and legal participants.","No live status, search ranking, legal authority, or destruction decision is changed.","Existing software can support a temporary catalog and audit trail.","The comparison uses a small, predefined set of realistic retrieval tasks."]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Design and configure a controlled lifecycle registry and governance process for one program or bounded policy portfolio, including status taxonomy, ownership mapping, approval routing, redirects, audit logging, training, and evaluation setup.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["A configurable repository or workflow platform is available rather than requiring a new enterprise system.","The policy family has hundreds rather than tens of thousands of instruments.","Most records and legal rules can be mapped without prolonged adjudication.","No extensive remediation of source documents or legacy search systems is included."]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Launch across a mid-sized agency or several programs, including broader inventory, repository integration, migration, review staffing, legal and archival controls, user training, monitoring, and initial remediation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["The agency has several repositories but not a government-wide integration scope.","Launch retains human authorization for consequential status changes.","Complex cross-agency instruments and major platform replacement are excluded.","The band includes internal labor and partner coordination as resource equivalents."]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Agency-level continuing review, ownership maintenance, trigger handling, exception and hold administration, registry quality control, audits, restore tests, training updates, and system support.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Coverage is agency-wide and requires dedicated governance capacity.","Review volume remains manageable through risk-based prioritization.","Material legal disputes and major software replacement are excluded.","Recurring effort depends strongly on instrument volume and policy-change frequency, neither of which is supplied."]}},"research_burden":"HIGH","earliest_credible_horizon":"3_TO_12_MONTHS","pipeline_gates":{"recognizable_externally_supportable_problem":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The packet describes observable repository conditions and a concrete falsifier, but provides no representative inventory, workflow-error data, public search evidence, or other external support showing that the problem is material rather than occasional."},"identifiable_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"The legally designated policy owner is identified as the operational-status authority, with records, legal, privacy, and archival functions identified for destruction, holds, preservation, and exceptions."},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The proposal claims that continuing lifecycle states and controls will improve identification of controlling guidance and reduce stale-instrument use relative to periodic manual cleanup; failure to outperform that baseline is an explicit falsifier."},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"One policy family and a stratified sample of 30 instruments can be assessed in a non-production catalog without deletion or alteration of legal authority, using predefined baseline and prototype comparisons."},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"The bounded evidence step is non-destructive and reversible, while automatic age-based revocation, destruction under holds or unresolved dependencies, metadata-based changes to rights, and concealment without redirects are expressly excluded."},"implementation_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"A bounded pilot scope permits a broad planning estimate, but the packet supplies no instrument counts, repository architecture, staffing rates, integration requirements, review throughput, or agency-wide operating scope sufficient to validate deployment and recurring ranges."}},"blocking_evidence":["A representative inventory showing whether obsolete or conflicting instruments are sufficiently frequent, visible, and connected to implementation errors or maintenance burden.","Evidence that policy owners, controlling authority, dependencies, holds, and preservation obligations can be identified with acceptable reviewer agreement and error rates.","A controlled comparison showing that the proposed lifecycle presentation improves identification of controlling guidance or reduces stale-instrument selection relative to the existing repository.","Defined thresholds and measurements for false retirement, missed dependencies, retrieval accuracy, restoration success, and reviewer agreement.","Comparative research against existing records schedules, policy registries, supersession systems, archival controls, and continuous-review programs.","Validated repository, staffing, integration, compliance, and recurring-review requirements for a named adoption scope."],"next_evidence_step":"With one consenting agency program, inventory one bounded policy family and draw a predefined stratified sample of 30 instruments. Two qualified reviewers should independently classify ownership, controlling authority, current status, conflicts, dependencies, and holds in a non-production catalog, without deleting or hiding anything. Then compare users' accuracy and time in identifying controlling guidance using the unchanged baseline repository versus the prototype catalog with lifecycle labels and redirects. Stop or deprioritize if obsolete or conflicting instruments are rare and absent from live use, reviewer agreement is inadequate, required authority or dependencies cannot be resolved, or the prototype fails to improve retrieval without introducing false-current or false-retired classifications.","research_questions":["How common are unlabeled, conflicting, superseded, or unowned instruments in representative policy families, and how often do users encounter them in live work or public search?","Can qualified reviewers reliably identify controlling authority, owners, dependencies, holds, and preservation obligations from available records?","Does a lifecycle-labeled catalog improve users' identification of controlling guidance relative to current repositories, and what new error modes does it create?","Which elements, if any, are incrementally different from established records-management, policy-registry, supersession, archival, and continuous-review practices?","What authorization sequence is required for operational status changes across different instrument classes, and where is authority decentralized or disputed?","What inventory volume, review throughput, integration work, and ongoing governance staffing would a defined agency scope require?","What thresholds for false retirement, missed dependencies, retrieval accuracy, reviewer agreement, and restoration performance would make progression acceptable?","Can the registry itself be kept current without becoming another stale or conflicting administrative layer?"],"recommendation":"VALIDATE_PROBLEM_FIRST","uncertainty_constraints":["No external evidence supports problem prevalence, stakeholder demand, realized impact, market size, or adoption willingness.","Prior art is unsearched, so distinctiveness and novelty cannot be established.","The packet provides no validated outcome measures, reliability thresholds, effect estimates, or comparative results.","Instrument volume, repository complexity, integration requirements, staffing availability, and review throughput are unspecified.","Legal authority, retention, privacy, archival, and dependency requirements may vary materially by agency and instrument class.","Cost bands are resource-equivalent planning ranges based on stated scopes and assumptions, not exact estimates or observed procurements."],"closed_book_prior_art_boundary":"This assessment makes no claim that the proposed lifecycle system is novel, rare, prevalent, or superior to existing government policy-governance or records-management practices; those comparisons require external prior-art and implementation research."}