telescope/ — Cross-Department Research Index

Cross-department pointer for the workspace's three department research archives, plus the home for research that is genuinely workspace-wide in scope. Read this before documenting any investigation, or before deciding which department's telescope a new investigation belongs in.

What This Is

Research direction is documented separately per department, each with its own dedicated archive:

This folder is not a general document repository. It holds only:

1. This index/pointer documentation
2. Research that is genuinely cross-cutting — see the classification rule below
3. The canonical template/ (each department instance also keeps its own copy)

Classification Rule — Where Does a New Investigation Go?

Applied at the time a research investigation is commissioned:

1. Default: file it under the requesting or most-affected department's instance.
2. Cross-cutting exception: if the investigation's findings affect workspace-wide governance or shared configuration used by every department (e.g. .claude/ config, a workspace-wide rule like mcp-governance.md, or cross-cutting infrastructure no single department owns), it stays here at the workspace root instead.
3. When a cross-cutting report is filed here, cross-link it from any department instance's index it materially concerns, so it isn't siloed from departments that rely on its findings.

Directory Structure

telescope/
├── README.md              ← Cross-department index — see this for the full picture
└── template/               ← Canonical report template (each department instance mirrors this)
    ├── research-report.md
    └── qa-document.md

A cross-cutting investigation gets its own YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>/ folder under this root per the rule above.

Creating a New Research Report Here

Only create a report directly in this folder if it meets the cross-cutting exception above. Otherwise, go to the relevant department's telescope/ instance and follow its CLAUDE.md.

1. Create a new folder: YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>/
2. Copy the template: template/research-report.md → YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>/research-report.md
3. Complete the report in the new folder
4. Add an entry to README.md (the cross-department index) and cross-link from any department index it concerns

Telescope Conventions

These rules apply to every telescope instance — root and all three departments.

Report Shape — two canonical forms

• Simple — a single research-report.md (+ optional qa-document.md) at the investigation folder root. Nothing else. Use this for any self-contained investigation.
• Programme — a top-level research-report.md (required; the consolidated synthesis) and optional qa-document.md, plus exactly one supporting/ folder holding everything ancillary: diagrams, deployment/migration plans, sub-investigation reports, implementation plans. No other subfolder name is permitted at the investigation root. A sub-investigation's own report still lives at supporting/<sub-slug>/research-report.md, and stays fully template-conformant. No inventing new folder names per report.

Status Lifecycle — four states

In Progress / Complete / Superseded / Abandoned. An investigation's Status must be updated in both its own research-report.md metadata table and its instance README.md index entry in the same commit — the README is the authoritative "what's active" view; do not rely on opening every folder to find out. Any In Progress investigation untouched for 90+ days must be reviewed by the instance owner (Lab Director / CPO / Studio Director-or-delegate) and reclassified as Complete, Abandoned, or recommitted with a new note — it may not sit silently as "active" indefinitely.

No physical archive//running/ subfolders. Status-based physical reorganization forces a file move on every status change, which fights the append-only rule below and churns git history without improving retrieval — the README Status column already does this job.

Rules (unchanged across all telescope instances)

• Every report lives in a YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>/ folder containing research-report.md.
• Every report is indexed in its instance's README.md.
• Use the shared template — do not invent alternative formats.
• This archive is append-oriented. Do not edit published reports except to correct factual errors (note the correction with a date in the report's metadata), and do not delete completed research reports without explicit direction from the User.
• Template skeleton (Metadata, Executive Summary, Investigation Scope, Research Questions, Methodology, Findings, Analysis, Recommendations, References, optional Appendices/Research Log/Open Questions) is fixed across all instances for citation and ADR-linkage consistency. Departments may add optional domain-specific addenda without forking the core structure.

Related Documentation