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Review & Publication

The review queue, approval and rejection workflow, and mesh acquisition rules.

The review and publication workflow is where maintainers decide which mesh contributions belong in the registry. This page describes the evidence, approval process, and rejection workflow.

Review queue

After a contributor submits a mesh and automated gates complete, the submission enters the needs_review state and appears in the maintainer review queue. Each submission in the queue carries:

  • Mesh identity and metadata — the domain name, mesh file, source information, and contributor details.
  • Digests — content hashes that prove mesh identity and detect duplicates across the registry.
  • Structural gate results — whether the mesh passes boundary-closure gates, element-quality screening, and duplicate detection.
  • Advisory scope verdict (L1) — an unsigned advisory assessment of scope-fitness that flags potential issues but never blocks approval.
  • Provenance declaration — the contributor's upstream source and rights statement.

Approval

When a maintainer approves a submission, Valence runs the following steps in order:

  1. Registry pointer published — the mesh's LFS pointer (object ID and size) is moved to the registry path on the HuggingFace dataset.
  2. Advisory scope verdict signed — if a scope verdict is present, it is signed into a cryptographic L2 DSSE envelope, ratifying the verdict content under a server signing key. Signing is best-effort; a signing failure never blocks approval.
  3. Job state transitions to approved — the submission is marked approved, indicating that the registry pointer is live and the manifest commit is queued.
  4. Manifest commit via CI publish drain — a background job dispatches to GitHub Actions, which commits the mesh entry to the manifest file in the registry repository. Once this completes, the mesh is published and discoverable via the registry search and API.

Rejection

A maintainer may reject a submission by providing a reason. The reason is stored, shown to the contributor, and allows them to resubmit with corrections. Rejection is a review decision only — the submission is marked rejected and removed from the queue.

The Mesh Acquisition hard rule

The registry's value depends on every entry being a real, published mesh with authentic provenance. As a reviewer, never accept a synthetic stand-in under a real-world geographic name.

State machine diagram: pending to processing to needs_review. Needs_review branches to approved (maintainer decision, bold) or rejected (maintainer decision, bold). Approved transitions to published via CI publish drain (dashed). Rejected and published transition to end state.

See also

Contributing Meshes describes the workflow from a contributor's perspective. Read Trust, Provenance & Authority Boundaries for how provenance and authority fit the registry's model.