The public directory (maintainer / mayor notes)

Maintainer-facing notes for the global murmurent_public repo. These notes live here, separate from the public directory's own README (docs/murmurent_public/README.md), which is kept simple for prospective members.

What the public directory is

A centre is a collection of labs and cores at an institution (an institution can run more than one). The public directory is separate: a single global repository (github.com/hallettmiket/murmurent_public) that serves as a directory only, listing participating institutions and, for each, the registrar's contact email. That is its entire function.

The repository holds only the institution list. GitHub Issues stay disabled, and joining runs by email to the registrar rather than a web form: a prospective member's netname, institution, role, PI, justification, and so on reach only the registrar's inbox, kept off GitHub entirely. This is deliberate, keeping the ecosystem free of a permanent, publicly archived record of "who wants to join what, where" across institutions.

Murmurent's code lives at github.com/hallettmiket/murmurent (public, cloned via bootstrap.sh). The public directory serves a single purpose: looking up who to email at each participating institution.

Creating the public directory (one time, by the ecosystem maintainer)

Already done, created once for the whole ecosystem by the maintainer. Each mayor's centre setup starts from here rather than repeating this step.

gh repo create hallettmiket/murmurent_public --public
git clone https://github.com/hallettmiket/murmurent_public /tmp/murmurent_public
cp -R docs/murmurent_public/. /tmp/murmurent_public/
cd /tmp/murmurent_public && git add -A \
  && git commit -m "seed murmurent_public directory" && git push
gh repo edit hallettmiket/murmurent_public --enable-issues=false   # no data collection

Listing a centre in the directory (each mayor, once)

When an institution goes live, its mayor adds one row to the public directory's README.md table: institution, a short description (centre / department / group name), and the join email (join_email on the centre, set via murmurent centre-init --join-email … or the /registrar profile editor). Only that row gets published.

Receiving + filing a join request (each mayor, ongoing)

1. A prospective member emails the registrar (the address in the directory).
2. The registrar reads the email and files the request locally:

murmurent join-request submit --kind lab \
  --name <proposed_name> --pi @<netname> \
  --email <requester_email> --institution <institution> \
  --justification "…"

3. Then approves or declines as usual (murmurent join-request approve|decline, or the /registrar dashboard). Provisioning (Slack/GitHub/FS) fires on approval.

Everything about the requester stays on the registrar's own machine and the centre's private lab_info, kept local to the centre's own infrastructure.

See docs/setup.md for the full centre deployment runbook and docs/slack_setup.md for the Slack fabric.