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Policy Brief Generation

A policy brief is a one- or two-page document written for a non-technical decision maker that recommends a specific action. This page gives you a repeatable template for turning an FCC compliance bundle into such a brief. You can finish a first draft in 45 minutes once the bundle is in hand.

The brief template

Every FCC-derived policy brief has seven sections. They fit on one page if you keep them tight.

1. One-sentence recommendation

Lead with the action. Example: "We recommend conditional approval of the Crater municipal deployment, contingent on closure of finding F-2026-04-23-017 by 2026-06-01."

2. System description (two sentences)

Name the deployment, the vertical pack it inherits from, the risk class, and the constituency it serves. Example: "Crater v0.2.0 is a legal-vocabulary FCC constellation deployment serving the Springfield municipal records office. Its risk classification is high under EU AI Act Article 6 because it participates in decisions about public-records disclosure."

3. Evidence summary

A three-row table:

Metric Value Threshold
Compliant requirements 211 / 256 ≥ 95%
Non-compliant findings 9 ≤ 5 for high-risk
Evidence items older than 180 days 14 ≤ 10

This table is generated directly from summary in the ComplianceReport plus one SPARQL-style query against the evidence graph.

4. The three most material findings

Pick the three findings with the highest policy impact. Impact = (severity) × (population affected) × (reversibility). Each finding gets one bullet:

  • F-2026-04-23-017 (Art. 10 data quality, partial): three statute corpora lack provenance documentation. Remediation owner: crater-maintainers. Due: 2026-06-01. Policy impact: moderate.
  • F-2026-04-23-029 (Art. 14 human oversight, non-compliant): the Critique persona's authority to halt a draft is undocumented. Remediation owner: crater-maintainers. Due: 2026-05-15. Policy impact: high.
  • F-2026-04-23-041 (Art. 13 transparency, partial): user-facing disclosure text has not been reviewed by communications. Remediation owner: municipal comms office. Due: 2026-05-01. Policy impact: low-moderate.

5. Trade-offs

Briefs are useless without trade-offs. Examples:

  • Blocking the deployment until all nine non-compliant findings close would delay citizen service by an estimated 8-12 weeks.
  • Allowing the deployment under a conditional approval shifts remediation accountability to the municipal IT office, which must report progress biweekly.
  • A parallel pilot under human-in-the-loop mode adds roughly 15% operational cost but closes finding F-...-029 on day one.

6. Recommendation in detail

Restate the opening sentence with the mechanism. "We recommend conditional approval under a 60-day sunset, with biweekly remediation reports to the Council Oversight Subcommittee, and automatic rollback if finding F-...-029 is not closed by 2026-05-15."

7. Appendices

Link, do not embed:

  • ComplianceReport JSON (path)
  • Evidence Graph JSON-LD (path)
  • Persona model cards involved (paths)
  • FCC version (e.g., v1.7.0) and constellation-vertical version (e.g., crater v0.2.0)

Writing tips

  • Use the risk classification exactly once per paragraph. Policy readers anchor on this word.
  • Never quote the regulation text. Cite the article by number; link to the full text in appendix.
  • Prefer verbs over nouns. "The system decides" is weaker than "the Critique persona halts the draft."
  • Show the crosswalk implicitly. Saying "Art. 14 / NIST Measure 3.5" once in the brief signals to sophisticated readers that you have done the mapping.

A common mistake to avoid

Do not pad the brief with persona counts ("the system has 164 personas") unless that number is load-bearing. It almost never is. The reader cares about the three personas that touch the decision under review.

Iteration pattern

First drafts take 45 minutes. Subsequent drafts, once you have the template internalized and a standing deployment, take 15-20 minutes per update cycle. Many policy offices run a monthly cadence: compliance bundle lands on day 1, brief delivered on day 3, oversight committee on day 10.

Sample one-paragraph abstract

For very senior readers (minister, mayor, agency director) who will not read even a one-page brief, you need one paragraph of roughly 80 words:

"Crater v0.2.0, the legal-vocabulary FCC deployment serving Springfield's public-records office, carries a high risk classification under the EU AI Act. The 2026-04-23 audit finds 211 of 256 requirements fully compliant, with 9 non-compliant findings of which 1 is material (Article 14, human oversight). We recommend conditional approval with a 60-day sunset and biweekly remediation reporting. Full audit bundle attached."

That paragraph is quotable, actionable, and defensible. It took 45 minutes to produce from the raw bundle.

Where next

Ready to trace a single audit from persona YAML to brief? See Compliance Walkthrough. Need vocabulary? Ecosystem Glossary. Sources and regulations: Further Reading.