The Policy Development Pipeline

How raw experience becomes a program for government. Every policy area moves through the same stages, each with a defined artifact and quality bar. The stages are automated by the policy-development-assistant plugin.

raw testimony (private)
      │  /capture-testimony
      ▼
testimonies/YYYY-MM-DD-<area>.md          dated, cleaned, redacted
      │  /research-policy <area>
      ▼
policy/<area>/research/                   evidence base
      ├── 01-problem-statement.md         testimony synthesized with quantified data
      ├── 02-israeli-law.md               the legislation that exists, and why it fails
      ├── 03-comparative.md + comparative/ how other countries handle it, case by case
      ├── 04-data.md                      CBS & other statistics, with sources
      └── 05-domestic-record.md           what Israel has already tried, and why it failed
      │  /draft-paper <area>
      ▼
../../../public/papers/                   the think-tank product, served for download
      ├── <area>.typ                      Typst source (house template)
      └── <area>.pdf                      compiled policy paper
      │  /update-platform
      ▼
platform/program-for-government.md        the meta-proposal, rolled up from all papers

Paths are relative to the content root, site/src/content/docs/ — the same tree this site is built from, so every document is both a source file in the repository and a page here.

The context layer

Running alongside the four stages, context/ records the political ground truth the platform is written against — the election, the outgoing Knesset, the parties running, and what they propose. It is not a pipeline stage; it is the baseline that makes gap analysis possible.

context/
├── election-2026/    date, trigger, procedure, polling
├── knesset-25/       outgoing composition, coalition, legislative record
├── parties/          one profile per party/list
└── matrices/         policy comparison matrices, one per area  ← /compare-parties <area>

A matrix answers the question a policy paper cannot answer about itself: is this proposal actually needed, actually distinctive, and actually passable? Proposals that turn out to be already law, already promised by four other parties, or dead on arrival with a blocking bloc get reframed or dropped. See the context layer’s rules for the evidence standards, which include rating our own column on the same scale as everyone else’s.

Stage gates

A policy area does not advance until its current stage meets the bar:

Stage	Artifact	Bar
1. Testimony	Dated markdown in testimonies/	Cleaned, redacted, frontmatter complete
2. Research	Five research docs	Every quantitative claim sourced or marked [UNVERIFIED]; legislation cited by name, year, and provision; ≥3 comparison countries incl. ≥1 instructive failure; domestic record covers prior attempts and names the veto player
3. Paper	Typst source + PDF	Compiles clean; follows house template; contains costed proposals and a steelmanned trade-offs section
4. Platform	Section in the program	Consistent with other planks; no promise without a mechanism

Evidence rules

Non-negotiable, and applied to every stage. They are set out in full in Evidence rules — no invented numbers, a fixed source hierarchy, precise legislative citation, and a mandatory trade-offs section in every proposal.