decisions.dabase.com/2026-07-27/record-decisions
Decisions reach people through many mediums — town halls, video, email, newsletters, chat. Every retelling drifts a little, and none of them is authoritative, so the same question gets re-litigated months later by people who were in a different room.
When this is raised, the conversation reliably turns to which medium the message should go out on. That is the wrong argument. Repetition across many mediums is good and we want all of them. What is missing is not a channel, it is a canonical thing for every channel to point at.
Every decision gets one record at decisions.dabase.com/YYYY-MM-DD/decision-name, stating at minimum its status, its owner, and an address to reply to. Every other piece of communication about that decision — short, long, video, newsletter, email, town hall — must link to it.
The reply address is not decoration. A record that cannot be argued with is an announcement wearing a record's clothes, and people stop reading it.
Records follow Michael Nygard's ADR format: title, status, context, decision, consequences, compliance, notes. Plain-text YAML, one decision per file, identified by its URL rather than a number, versioned in git, immutable once accepted. Chosen over a wiki page because a wiki invites silent editing, and the whole value here is that a decision's history cannot be quietly rewritten.
This record is itself the first application of the rule.
No announcement, deck or town-hall slide about a decision ships without a link to its record; comms review checks for the link and bounces anything without one.
The build validates every record against the schema and fails on a missing field, a duplicate number or a superseded record with no successor. Records overdue for review are listed on the index.
Disagree, or spot something wrong? hendry@iki.fi Records change by being superseded, so say so and it gets a new one. Every change to this record is in the commit history.