Skip to content

Status correction — 3 October 2026: UNAPPROVED PRELIMINARY MATERIAL. Retained as research input only. Chris has limited the current task to collecting future-planning scope, sources, confirmed decisions and unresolved matters. Actual implementation planning is a separate phase he will initiate. Architecture, sequencing and proposed controls here are not approved or an implementation approval request. Separately recorded owner decisions still apply.

Lifecycle, gold-answer and direction settings proposal — 3 October 2026

This document distinguishes confirmed owner direction from recommendations for approval. No stage status, answers, grants, schema, migration or prototype was changed.

P11 / LC1 — confirmed lifecycle direction

Chris confirms automatic completion must include absence of unresolved applicable work: existing drafts and outstanding corrections participate in the readiness check, not only target counts. Before allowing a change that would turn a Completed stage into Active, alert the project admin and obtain admin confirmation for that change. After the approved change is made, automatic mode transitions to Active automatically; manual mode must be explicitly reopened/manually switched off. Preserve the recovered new-study auto-reopening toggle, histories and session-version rules.

Target sufficiency is distinct from stage status. Current Complete remains a qualifying review despite a stale warning alone; explicitly creating a current incomplete version removes its completed contribution. An autosaved draft is not an explicit submission/version and cannot silently change that contribution. Yet applicable unresolved draft work can prevent automatic stage completion independently of target sufficiency. Do not close a stage while applicable work remains just because its numeric target is met.

Proposed exact flow for approval

  • Compute readiness from effective compatible contributions plus applicable unresolved saved/draft/correction tasks. Superseded/resolved drafts are not counted forever; disposal must be explicit and audited, retaining history. Mere abandoned-state inference is insufficient.
  • A reviewer may keep edits locally/as an unconfirmed draft. On a Completed stage, recommend recording a pending change request with exact affected stages/versions before admitting a server-side change that would introduce applicable unresolved work or a new incomplete current version. Do not commit the protected change, reopen, or change sufficiency before approval.
  • Admin sees actor, reason, old/current proposed versions, affected shared forms and stages, readiness impact and manual/automatic mode. Approve that change, not a blanket future reopening waiver. Approval does not grant the initiator missing Review/Design authority.
  • Recheck current permission, approval expiry, source hashes and stage state at commit. Changed inputs invalidate approval and require fresh review. For shared work, require applicable admin authority/confirmation for every affected Completed stage; commit consistently or defer all.
  • In automatic mode, commit approved underlying change and Active status with one durable transition record. In manual mode, recommended UI pairs approval with explicit Reopen action before commit; approving alone must not silently reopen. Record both acts distinctly even if performed in one dialog by an authorized admin.
  • New study arrivals retain automatic reopening direction but use this approval gate when they would affect a Completed stage: preview approved affected additions, then automatic transition after import/admission commits. No spontaneous bypass of the new owner confirmation rule.
  • Active-stage existing drafts may finish under normal admission. Proper readiness prevents automatic completion while those drafts remain applicable. For a historical/manually Completed stage with applicable drafts, recommend the same approval/reopen flow before further protected changes; no silent destruction or unconditional draft-finish promise.

Exact pending-draft persistence, approval expiry, affected-stage transaction/fence and queue UI are engineering proposals. New lifecycle capability/defaults are proposed in the matrix, not approved merely by this lifecycle direction. Numeric targets are never manually rewritten to pretend a stage has no work.

P14 / UA1 — confirmed optional-unanswered clarification

Completed candidates must answer applicable required questions; candidate blanks normally occur on optional questions. Reconciler may determine their accepted answer. Missing/unanswered is not explicit Not applicable. Chris suggests a configurable all applicable gold questions must be answered policy; exact scope/default is not approved. Explicit N/A+N/A agrees, Applicable+ N/A differs; compatible different question versions compare with clear flags, incompatible versions not automatically compared. These decisions do not establish blank+blank agreement or a statistical denominator formula.

Project setting Gold answer completeness, default Follow question requiredness. Form setting Inherit project / Follow question requiredness / All applicable questions. Recommend no stage override because one shared form has one authoritative reconciliation task. Use form-local override only with Design/publication authority, version the effective policy and pin it to the task. Candidate completion retains its own question-requiredness rules; stricter gold policy does not retroactively invalidate valid optional-blank candidates.

“All applicable” requires a valid value or permitted explicit Unknown/Not reported response; blank is incomplete. N/A is valid only where allowed and with applicable branch semantics, never manufactured for a blank. Inapplicable descendants need not be answered. Reconciler sees optional candidate blanks and can enter an accepted answer from evidence or explicit allowed unknown state. Do not infer a factual answer from absence. Existing gold is unchanged until valid final reconciliation submit. Save/autosave unfinished; unseen-control warning Complete anyway cannot bypass required-answer validation, whichever effective gold policy applies.

Statistical contract recommendation — separate approval

Show explicit agreement/disagreement for comparable provided values and valid N/A under AG3. Show missing/unanswered as comparison not assessed, never positive agreement by default, including blank+blank. Report missing counts and total eligible candidate contexts alongside comparable counts. Recommend denominators for a simple agreement view use assessed comparisons only, clearly labeled, with missing coverage shown separately; this is not approved exclusion policy and no kappa/multi-reviewer formula is selected. Explicit Unknown/Not reported is a recorded answer state, distinct from blank; recommend report it as a separate state before choosing whether equality contributes to any metric. Owner/method review must approve its comparison and denominator treatment separately from gold completeness.

Examples: two optional blanks let gold reviewer answer independently; under Follow requiredness gold may remain blank, under All applicable it cannot. Two allowed N/A states agree; blank+N/A is not N/A agreement. Required gold blank fails validation even when reviewer chooses Complete anyway for unseen content. History/export preserves actual recorded states and recoverable versions.

P10 / ODIR1 — confirmed single outcome-measure direction

Chris clarifies the same outcome measure must not have different GreaterIsWorse direction across cohorts in the same paper/population. Record one versioned outcome-measure direction; no cohort/population context override. If measurement meanings differ, create separate outcome measures. This settles P10 and supersedes the prior open override recommendation. An obvious counterexample can be brought back with evidence, but does not authorize arbitrary overrides.

Migration recommendation: retain all original series direction values as source evidence; propose one measure value only if they agree under the mapping. Conflicting values need review: correct a source error with provenance or separate genuinely distinct measures. Do not invent context overrides, normalize by sign, or pick a majority. Export the effective measure version/direction and retain source values in recoverable history.

Approval checklist

  1. LC1 protected-change request and per-affected-stage confirmation/commit flow; manual reopen action paired explicitly with approval; completed legacy drafts route.
  2. Gold completeness project default and form override (recommend Follow requiredness/inherit).
  3. Statistical missing-state/Unknown comparison and denominator contract separately from gold policy.
  4. Migration handling of conflicting legacy direction values; single measure direction itself is settled.

See the permission matrix and migration plan. These are reviewable proposals; no broad product interrogation or execution is needed before Chris can review them.