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Publication: what the public site shows

Something is on the public site when you can get to it from the site's own front page by following relationships that publish.

That is the whole rule. Everything below is a consequence of it.

Before this, every gathering and every camp was on the public site simply by existing. There was no way to see why something was there and no way to take it off — which is how a camp nobody had decided to publish ended up on the site, with nobody able to say what had put it there.

Reachable, not a chain

Publication spreads outward from the public site's own root holon, along every relationship that rests on a publishing step:

the site root  →  a gathering  →  a camp  →  an experience

but also sideways, and in any direction: an organisation linked to a published camp is published, and so is a camp linked to a published organisation. Which way round the relationship was created carries no meaning.

One route is enough. A camp whose own relationship publishes is public even if its gathering is not — the camp can be reached another way. This is a change: publication used to be a chain down the tree, where an unpublished gathering took everything under it off the site in one move. It no longer does. To take something off the public site, take away every publishing route to it, and the "Where this appears" section lists them so you can see them all.

Nothing is published by default. A kind of holon that has not been set up for publication at all is never public, whatever its relationships say.

How to publish something, and how to stop

Open the holon, go to Configuration, and find Where this appears. It shows:

  • whether it is on the public site right now;
  • every relationship that bears on it, one per row, with the journey and step each rests on, and whether that step publishes;
  • for each row, whether the holon at the other end is itself public;
  • a link to the live public page when it is published.

There is no single "the reason" row any more, because there is no single chain. The reason lives on the other holon's own page, one click away, where the same section answers the same question about it — so every other end is a link.

To publish or unpublish, use Change step. It opens the relationship and you move it to a step that publishes (or off one). There is no separate "publish" button and no separate permission: if you may edit that relationship, you may publish it, and if you may not, you cannot.

If the holon has no relationship at all, the section offers Link it to something on the public site instead — until a relationship exists there is nothing for publication to rest on.

Which steps publish

A step publishes when it carries the public-visible setting. A journey can carry it too, in which case every step of that journey publishes.

Wherever a step is shown — a kanban column, a journey's step list, a step picker, a roster row — a publishing step carries the same globe chip. A kanban column that publishes is marked, and moving a card onto or off it warns you that the card is joining or leaving the public site before the move happens.

⚠️ The setting belongs to the step, not to one holon. Putting public-visible on a step of a journey that many holons share publishes everything resting on that step — including things you were not thinking about when you set it. On a shared journey, prefer marking one specific step; use the journey-level setting only when the entire pipeline is genuinely public.

The journey editor shows a count of how many things are published through each step, so you can see the size of what a step is publishing before changing it.

People, organisations and events

People, organisations and Coherence events are not published directly. They are published by what they are attached to:

  • A person has a public profile when they hold a public role on something that is itself published.
  • A person also has a public profile when they appear in a Coherence conversation whose video has been made public on YouTube. Making the video private again, or removing them from the conversation, takes the profile down.

  • An organisation has a public page when it is related to something published by a relationship that rests on a publishing step. An organisation that is not linked to a published camp can be published from The Gathering's page: Related Organisations → Add relationship, on a publishing step.

  • A Coherence event has a public page when someone links it to something published on a publishing step. To do that, open The Gathering, go to Events → Connect event, pick the event, and choose the "Public Event" journey's "Public" step. It is never published just because one of its conversations has a public video. Its page shows its conversations whose video is public, the dates they span, its hosts and, when that is itself public, what it belongs to. Hosting a published event is a public role, so it gives the host a public profile, and that profile lists the event under "Events" — as does the profile of anyone in one of its public videos.

So taking a camp off the public site also removes the camp from the public pages of the people and organisations attached to it. Their own pages stay up if they are attached to something else that is still published — which is the same "one route is enough" rule as above.

What a visitor sees

A page for something that is not published returns not found, exactly as if it had never existed — on the public site and in the public data feeds alike. Guessing a web address does not reveal anything: "nothing links to it" was never a way of keeping something private, and it is not one now.

Lists follow the same rule, so nothing unpublished is named, linked, or counted anywhere a visitor can reach — including the site's own navigation.

A share link keeps working for a person who is not published. A share link is something its owner deliberately handed out, so it is honoured on its own terms rather than through publication. It is the one carve-out from the rule above, and it applies only to links that were explicitly created to be shared.