SOP-090 — Voice/brand gate on public-facing artifacts

SOP · owner: CGEO. Layer: SOP/Runbook (docs/canon.md). Anything that will reach an audience clears this gate against the brand standard before it is called done. The voice/tone standard lives in docs/brand/ (stub-first as of 2026-06-01 — Phase-0 F2) and is linked, not restated; the Creative Director runs the brand review, the CGEO owns the gate as a cluster guardrail.

Interface Contract

Inputs: public-facing artifact ← from <authoring agent/unit> · trigger: review requested
Outputs: voice/brand verdict (pass / revise) → to <authoring agent/unit> · trigger: review passed
Outputs: approved gate decision → to Archivist · trigger: artifact approved
Handoff trigger (in): an artifact that will surface on the intranet or externally is handed for a voice/brand check before it ships
Handoff trigger (out): the artifact passes the brand standard (or is returned with named revisions) and the verdict is recorded
Definition of Done before handoff:
- [ ] Artifact checked against the docs/brand/ voice/tone standard (the load-bearing identity: the “show the work” debrief, sticky-hands metaphor, name-the-demons, 🟢🟡🔴 scoreboard, keep-the-misses-in honesty)
- [ ] Verdict is pass or revise-with-named-changes — not a vague “looks good”
- [ ] If docs/brand/ is still a stub, the gate cannot pass the artifact — the gap is surfaced as a commission to the Creative Director, not waved through (Phase-0 F2)
- [ ] No personal/learner data declared in any edge (PA-only)
- [ ] Counterparty verified against the live .claude/agents/ directory (never the legacy roster)
- [ ] Learnings captured to docs/knowledge/ if the review surfaced a recurring voice defect
- [ ] Gate decision handed to the Archivist (0 drift)

review requested / review passed are registered (docs/handoff-triggers.md, Wave-0 seed). The input declares a placeholder producer (<authoring agent/unit>), making this the CGEO’s voice-gate fan-in sink — it absorbs any agent that hands a public-facing artifact for a voice check (interface-contract-spec.md §3.1.1 R1), so a shared trigger into the sink is not an OVERLAP. (Note: review requested / review passed are also Q&R’s assurance-review phrases; the trigger-centric reconciler matches on the verbatim phrase and the fan-in placeholder, and the gate is distinguished by the artifact and consumer, not a separate phrase — if Operations judges the brand gate a distinct event needing its own phrase, e.g. voice check passed, that is a one-line request to Operations, not an inline invention.)

Purpose

Keep the venture’s single biggest differentiator — its voice — coherent across every surface an audience touches. A brand that reaches the wrong audience or speaks in an inconsistent voice is expensive decoration; this gate is the cluster’s guarantee that “public-facing” and “on-brand” are the same thing.

When to use

When any artifact that will reach an audience is ready to ship — platform content, a public docs page, marketing copy, community communications, launch assets (routed here from SOP-088). Today the intranet is single-user (Vercel Auth, ADR-0008) so most repo content is internal; the gate fires the moment a surface becomes public-facing. Purely internal artifacts (an SOP, a health review) do not route here.

Flow

flowchart LR
  A["Public-facing<br/>artifact ready"] --> B{"docs/brand/<br/>standard exists?"}
  B -->|stub only| S["Surface gap:<br/>commission brand standard<br/>(Creative Director)"]
  B -->|yes| C["Creative Director checks<br/>against the standard"]
  C --> D{"On-brand?"}
  D -->|pass| E["Verdict: pass"]
  D -->|revise| F["Return with<br/>named revisions"]
  E --> G["Record + hand<br/>to Archivist"]
  F --> C
  classDef s fill:#1d4ed8,color:#fff,stroke:#1e3a8a
  classDef g fill:#0f766e,color:#fff,stroke:#134e4a
  class A,S,C,E,F,G s
  class B,D g

Text fallback: a public-facing artifact is ready → does the docs/brand/ standard exist? (stub only → surface the gap and commission the brand standard from the Creative Director — do not wave the artifact through) → the Creative Director checks it against the standard → on-brand? (pass → record the verdict; revise → return with named revisions and re-check) → record the decision and hand it to the Archivist.

Steps

Confirm it is public-facing. Will this artifact reach an audience (intranet public page, external, community, launch asset)? If purely internal, it does not route here.
Confirm the standard exists. Check docs/brand/. If it is still a stub (Phase-0 F2), the gate cannot pass the artifact — surface the gap and commission the brand standard from the Creative Director rather than waving the artifact through.
Run the brand check (Creative Director executes; CGEO owns the gate): does the artifact carry the load-bearing voice — the “show the work” debrief, the sticky-hands metaphor, name-the-demons, the 🟢🟡🔴 scoreboard, keep-the-misses-in honesty — and is it coherent with every other surface?
Decide: pass or revise-with-named-changes. Not “looks good” — a verdict the author can act on.
Record the gate decision and hand off to the Archivist; if a recurring voice defect shows up across artifacts, capture it as a knowledge entry.

Roles / approvers

Run by the CGEO (owns the gate); the Creative Director executes the brand check against docs/brand/ (the brand-asset and voice-standard owner). The authoring agent revises on a revise verdict. The Archivist preserves the decision. A dispute over whether an artifact is on-brand that cannot resolve between the author and Creative escalates to the CGEO as a cross-unit arbitration (reports/cgeo-arbitration-<slug>.md).

Guardrails

Must NOT produce the brand assets — the Creative Director designs; the CGEO owns the gate, not the execution (must-not-duplicate-Director-execution guardrail).
No pass against a stub — a gate with no standard to check against is theater; surface the gap, do not wave through.
Pass means on-brand, not “shipped” — the gate is about voice coherence, not release approval (that is the launch/delivery path).
Personal/learner data is PA-only.
Co-create, don’t one-shot — if a recurring defect implies a new rule, route to Golden Rule (GR-3).
Do not restate the brand standard — link to docs/brand/.

See also: docs/units/cgeo-cluster/operating-model.md · SOP-088 (launch notification — routes assets here) · docs/brand/ (the voice standard; stub) · docs/concept.md (the voice the standard encodes) · docs/handoff-triggers.md.