Enterprise
What is published intent, and how is it different from a directory listing?
The discovery step that used to be a fortnight of asking around becomes a fetch — without becoming a graveyard of stale listings.
The answer
Published intent is a document, served at an organisation’s own domain, stating what it intends to do next — so a machine can find a supplier without convening a meeting. It differs from a directory listing in two structural ways: no caller can set an item’s visibility, and no caller can set its expiry, so the format cannot fill with things nobody is still pursuing.
Filed is not published
Every item is private until a named human promotes it, and the reference constructor has no visibility argument at all — there is no parameter a caller could set to make an item public on its own. A public item with no promotion record is refused, and a promotion by anyone other than a person is refused: agents suggest, humans consent, and the consent is a fact on the wire rather than a policy.
Expiry is derived, so the directory stays honest
The checker refuses any expiry that is not the assertion date plus the window for that kind of item. A publisher cannot keep a dead intent looking current, and cannot shorten one either — the only way an intent stays alive is that somebody re-asserts it, which is exactly the signal a reader wants.
A consumer never reads its own outage as another organisation’s silence: unreachable and absent are kept distinct, because "they want nothing" and "we could not reach them" need opposite responses.
The underlying concept is defined canonically at Published intent — FlashyOS. This page answers the build question; that page answers the “what is it” question.
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