Caring for what people choose to make public.

Participating in Rethreading means contributing to a public archive. Before beginning, participants are told that an approved version of their contribution will be publicly available if they complete and submit it.

But being public does not mean everything a participant enters automatically becomes public.

Participants can skip optional questions, choose between text and audio where those options are available, avoid details they do not want published, and stop before submitting.

Before publication, contributions are reviewed for identifying information, private information about other people, and other material that could create significant risk.

The goal is not simply to collect a story. It is to give people meaningful choices about what version of their experience enters the public record.

We maintain a distinction between what someone contributes to the project and what ultimately appears in the archive.

Raw survey responses, review notes, consent records, original processing materials, and other internal information are not automatically made public simply because someone contributes a public story.

Instead, the archive publishes a deliberately created public version of the contribution.

That version may include a participant's story, approved audio or transcript, themes they identified, selected contextual information, and the quilt square generated from their responses.

Only material intended for publication is used by the public website, archive search, and other public-facing features.

A public story does not automatically become a public dataset.

The structured questions in Rethreading help participants look at an experience from different angles: what mattered, who shaped what happened, where care or joy appeared, how they responded, what became clearer, and what they would rethread.

Those responses may also help create searchable themes, summaries, transcripts, and visual representations.

But the categories are not the story.

We distinguish, wherever possible, between what participants contribute - their words, recordings, selections, reflections, and interpretations - and what the project creates: transcripts, editorial summaries, searchable metadata, visual mappings, and other materials used to preserve or navigate the archive.

We maintain information about where these materials came from and how they were created so that project-generated interpretations do not quietly become substitutes for someone's own account.

Making the archive searchable allows individual stories to be placed in relationship without requiring them to become the same.

Themes such as care, power, joy, community, resistance, learning, identity, and change can become pathways through the archive.

Someone might find an experience that echoes their own, encounter one that complicates what they thought they knew, or notice a pattern that would be difficult to see within a single story.

But search categories are pathways, not conclusions.

The archive is designed so that patterns lead back to the stories that produced them. The quilt works in much the same way: patterns become visible when squares are placed together, while each square remains connected to a particular experience.

The whole does not require the pieces to become the same.

Publishing a story on the open web means accepting a limit to what any archive can control.

Public material may be indexed by search engines, linked to or quoted by other people, downloaded, cached, copied, preserved by web archives, analyzed by automated systems, or collected by third parties.

Public web content may also be encountered or collected by systems used to develop, train, evaluate, or operate artificial intelligence.

Rethreading the Algorithm cannot guarantee that publicly available material will never be used in these ways, nor can we know every place a public story may eventually travel.

We believe people should understand that possibility before contributing.

There is an important difference between making a story available to the public and Rethreading deciding to intentionally repurpose participant contributions for another use.

Participation in the archive does not mean that we treat a participant's private responses, unpublished materials, or raw contribution as available for any purpose we choose.

If Rethreading later considers a substantially different use of participant material, such as intentionally creating a research dataset, releasing structured data for computational research, or entering a partnership specifically intended to develop an AI system, we will treat that as a new stewardship decision rather than assuming participation in the public archive provides blanket permission.

Public participation is not unlimited permission for future use.

Stewardship also means practicing restraint.

The project may need information behind the scenes to receive, process, review, secure, and publish a contribution. That does not mean all of that information belongs on the public web.

Private and public materials are kept separate. Public story pages and archive search use only information approved for publication. Internal survey records, consent records, review information, and other restricted materials are not exposed simply because they are technically connected to a public story.

We also avoid publishing unnecessary structured data or internal classifications merely because they would be easy to make available.

What can be made public and what needs to be made public are different questions.

A person's relationship to a story can change.

Participants can contact Rethreading to request a correction or withdrawal of a published contribution. When we honor a withdrawal request, we can remove the story and its associated public materials from the parts of the archive we control and exclude them from future project-controlled publications or releases.

But withdrawal has limits.

Once something has been publicly available, copies may exist outside our systems. We cannot guarantee removal from search-engine caches, web archives, screenshots, downloads, third-party copies, or automated systems that previously encountered the material.

That does not make withdrawal meaningless.

Our responsibility is to act on what remains within our care and to be truthful about what does not.

Stories can change as they move through an archive.

Audio can become a transcript. Identifying information may be redacted. A story may be corrected. Themes can make it searchable. Survey responses can become a quilt square.

We preserve information about these transformations so that we can understand how a published artifact came to exist.

This includes keeping distinctions between original contributions and edited or generated materials, documenting consent and publication conditions, identifying AI-generated audio when it is used, and maintaining records of corrections or withdrawals.

For us, provenance is part of care.

A story should not become detached from the conditions under which it was shared simply because it can be represented as data.

We cannot anticipate every technology, research method, partnership, or use that may exist over the life of this archive.

So stewardship cannot be a decision we make once.

As Rethreading grows, we will continue asking questions about who can access what, what new uses are appropriate, what should remain protected, whose perspectives should shape significant decisions, and whether our technical systems still reflect the commitments we have made to contributors.

That includes reconsidering our practices as the technological environment around the archive changes.

Stewardship is not a promise of complete control. It is a commitment to exercise care over what we can control, to preserve context as stories move through the project, and to be transparent about the limits of our control.