The message came from a technician in the Seam. Not a complaint. A question.
He had read the methodology note on the template — the new one, the Transparent version, second iteration, committee-revised — and he wanted to know if the score was calculated before or after the session intake.
Gyeol-ri read it three times. It was a reasonable question. It had a correct answer. She had simply not considered that anyone would ask it, because the people who had seen the previous template had not asked anything.
The score was calculated after intake. The intake session — forty minutes, structured observation, the technician's notes plus the client's self-report — produced the raw inputs. The algorithm ran after. The score appeared on the documentation the following day.
She had not specified this. She had specified the score range, the primary indicators, one methodology note about the validation dataset, and the asterisk. She had not specified when. She had not specified when because she had not thought anyone would care about when, because the previous template had not told them enough to know that when was a question worth asking.
She updated the caption: score calculated post-intake. Six words. Under the methodology note, not in it.
Then she sat with what had happened.
The committee had chosen Transparent because Hyun-woo argued that information before trust forms is different from information after trust breaks. She had agreed with the conclusion without fully inhabiting the mechanism. The mechanism was: if people understand more, they ask more. The technician's question was not a problem with the template. It was the template working.
She added a note to her own file: first consequence of Transparent. A question, not a complaint. Score post-intake. Update caption. Note that this is the beginning of a different kind of accountability — not for the outcome, but for the methodology itself.
The asterisk was still there. She had not figured out how to resolve it. But now someone was reading the document carefully enough to find it.