UXR Provenance, Versioning, and Archival Roadmap

Roadmap status: Active development plan
Published: August 4, 2026

Current reality: No canonical public repository, signed release system, external archival deposit, or DOI currently exists.

What exists now: Website publication history, founder attribution, public notices, a history, research notebook, source-of-truth declaration, changelog, and constitutional integrity pledge.

What would count as completion: A designated public repository, durable version history, signed or otherwise verifiable releases where practical, third-party deposit records, and persistent identifiers for major releases.

Objective

UXR needs a public record that establishes authorship, preserves exact historical versions, supports academic citation, and allows readers to verify whether a document existed in a particular form at a particular time.

The current website publication history contributes to that record, but website dates alone should not become the project's only provenance system.

Current protections

• publicly published canonical documents;
• founder attribution;
• copyright and reuse notice;
• central history and research notebook;
• official source-of-truth declaration;
• central changelog;
• constitutional integrity pledge.

Planned public repository

UXR plans to maintain a public repository containing canonical text in a durable, portable format such as Markdown.

The repository should include stable document identifiers, version numbers, dated commits, release notes, diffs, superseded versions, machine-readable metadata, and a clear statement identifying official releases.

Status: Planned. No public repository is yet designated as canonical.

Planned archival deposits and permanent identifiers

Major UXR releases should be deposited in a reputable third-party preservation service. Candidate repositories include Zenodo and the Open Science Framework.

Major milestone releases may receive Digital Object Identifiers, allowing stable academic and public citation.

Status: Planned for a sufficiently stable milestone release. No DOI has yet been issued.

Document metadata standard

UXR plans to standardize document title and ID, authority level, version, dates, canonical URL, responsible editor, lineage, change summary, copyright, and licensing status.

Status: Initial metadata exists on several pages. Full normalization remains in progress.

Release cadence

The future versioning policy should distinguish editorial corrections, clarifying revisions, methodological revisions, constitutional revisions, and major public releases.

Canonical current state and archival history serve different purposes

A public canonical case or document should present the strongest current account rather than force readers through every superseded detail that appeared while evidence was still developing. Exact provenance and public clarity are compatible because they can live in different layers.

For case work, UXR should preserve the contributor's original account and the evidentiary working history privately or in controlled archival records as appropriate. The current public case may then be rewritten around better-supported facts as evidence improves. An ordinary difference between remembered wording, timing, or another detail and a later artifact does not need to become a public credibility event merely to prove that UXR kept an audit trail.

A discrepancy should remain visible publicly when the discrepancy itself materially affects the finding, causation, responsibility, credibility analysis, or fair interpretation of conflicting evidence. Otherwise, the archive preserves how the record changed while the canonical public case preserves what the evidence currently supports.

Change-log purpose

The UXR changelog should make substantive project maturation inspectable: framework revisions, methodological discoveries, operational milestones, case-architecture changes, material public-case developments, and corrections that alter the meaning of a finding. It should not become a duplicate of the private evidence audit trail or a catalog of ordinary contributor memory refinements.

When live casework exposes a weakness in UXR's own evidence language, correction handling, publication practice, privacy, routing, or case architecture, the resulting methodological change should be recorded. This allows journalists, academics, contributors, institutions, and future UXR maintainers to see how the system matured through contact with actual cases rather than presenting the framework as if it arrived fully formed.

Evidence preservation

Where a document change follows a major review, case analysis, or methodological discovery, the changelog should identify the trigger without exposing confidential contributor information or turning ordinary contributor corrections into public credibility events. Future repositories and archives should preserve exact historical versions where appropriate, while the public canonical surface remains optimized for the strongest current account.

Copyright © 2026 Sean Arenas. This roadmap documents intended work and does not claim that planned repositories, signatures, deposits, or DOIs already exist.