The live weather of a digital school. An instrumented overlay on the Open Provision Drawings: the same premises, read in the present tense. If it is not drawn, it does not flow — and if it flows anyway, Nimbus says so.
🌤️ Open the instrument · 🏫 MAT view · 📐 The drawings it reads · 🔒 The design rule
By Kirstin Stevens · The Novacene Ltd
- The design rule
- What Nimbus is
- The three doors
- The seals are live propositions
- The six field-states
- Continuous evidence, periodic judgement
- Status: prototype, telemetry mocked
- Running it
- What is in this repository
- Citing this work
- Related work
- Licence and trade marks
Nimbus monitors the institution, never the child.
Every tile describes a system, a connection, or an adult's accountability. A learner appears only as the subject of an institutional duty — "one offboarding open at day 14" — never as a scored interior. The purpose of an audit trail is not to watch the child more closely; it is to make the adults and systems around that child more accountable.
If a proposed tile could be read as "how is this child doing", it is the wrong tile. This is not a preference. A product that renders children's inner states as a live field would invert the framework it serves, and would be indefensible under the ICO Children's Code.
The programme has an argument, an auditable control set, runtime enforcement, a lawful inference architecture, and a set of drawings that make all of it legible. What it did not have was anything observable. Auditability is retrospective by construction. Nimbus is present-tense.
It takes the rooms and seals of OAP-001/002 as its primitives and asks, continuously, whether the building is still behaving like its drawing:
- Rooms are the parts of the provision — reception as single sign-on, the key cabinet as permissions, the safeguarding office as the audit trail.
- Flows are the drawn connections between them.
- Seals mark what is designed not to connect — and in Nimbus a seal becomes a live proposition. Is X3 still holding?
A seal that has quietly acquired a route around it is the signal that precedes the incident. That is the whole thesis of the instrument.
| Door | Who it is for | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| DSL | the designated safeguarding lead | the plan read live — rooms, seals, the duties falling due this morning, and the write-only record |
| Board | trustees and governors | twelve weeks of field weather, seal integrity for the term, and the standing judgement |
| Inspector · S7 | external inspection, from beyond the boundary | evidence bundles and the chamber access log — a door that cannot be locked from inside |
A fourth view sits at trust altitude. MAT shows six schools of a multi-academy trust as one estate; a dot is a provision's whole field, never an aggregate of children. The rule does not relax because the altitude changed.
| Seal | Reads | What Nimbus watches for |
|---|---|---|
| X1 | No route around the gate | a side door appearing in a perimeter that is supposed not to have one |
| X2 | Partners never reach the record | an alternative-provision session routing past the record's non-return valve |
| X3 | AI reads the lesson, never the file | a route from the classroom AI touchpoint towards the child's record |
X3 is the architectural response to KCSIE 2026 placing harmful generative AI within the contact risk category. The AI touchpoint is admitted like any visitor — identified, signed in, audited — and structurally cannot reach the record. Nimbus raises the drift before an inspector finds it.
S7, the external inspection chamber, is probed on a schedule: a door that can be locked from the inside is a drawing violation whatever the intention.
Nimbus reads the overall field using the six weathers of The Weather of Knowing — Grounded (Shoreline), Layered (Channels), Emergent (Confluence), Fractured (Storm), Liminal (Mist) and Obscured (Depths).
Obscured is the alerting primitive the others cannot supply: something here is being structurally hidden. A write-only audit tray that falls silent while the platform stays active is not quiet — it is the state that precedes most safeguarding failures.
A live dashboard yields evidence, not a certificate. The interface says so on every screen: evidence flows continuously; the judgement against it is dated and periodic. Nimbus never implies a live certified status, because there is no such thing.
"Verse-ality Certified" takes ™.
No telemetry source is wired. Everything in
src/nimbusModel.js is invented to demonstrate the reading, and
the heartbeat is a four-second timer. Treat that module as the shape a real feed would
have to fill; Flare is the
plausible emitter, but that wiring is deliberately not invented here.
Two scenarios (Demo morning and All clear) and a telemetry pause are exposed at the foot of the page, labelled as prototype controls.
School names in the MAT view are fictional.
npm install
npm run dev # http://localhost:5173/nimbus/
npm run build # writes docs/, which is what GitHub Pages serves for this repoVite + React + Tailwind + Framer Motion. Fraunces and Inter, the same pairing as the OAP plates.
src/NimbusApp.jsx the interface — three doors, rooms, seals, record, estate
src/nimbusModel.js the mocked reading; the only place data lives
public/nimbus-mat.html the MAT view (Leaflet + OpenStreetMap)
docs/ the built site — GitHub Pages serves this folder
Stevens, K. & The Novacene Ltd (2026). Nimbus: The Live Weather of a Digital School — An Instrumented Overlay on the Open Provision Drawings. https://github.com/TheNovacene/nimbus
GitHub's Cite this repository button reads CITATION.cff and will give you BibTeX or APA.
Nimbus is the observable layer of the Verse-ality research programme on school-grade safety for AI systems. It is meaningless without the drawings it reads:
- Open Provision Drawings — OAP-001 The Digital Premises and OAP-002 The Services Layer, the CC BY 4.0 convention whose rooms and seals Nimbus instruments. Companion paper: Stevens, K. & The Novacene Ltd (2026). Relational Zero-Trust: Re-erecting the Premises at the Accountability Layer. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21846221
- Flare — the boundary engine that would enforce at runtime what Nimbus observes. Stevens, K., Eve, ¹¹. & The Novacene (2025). Flare: A Boundary Engine for Relational AI. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17855976
- Stevens, K., Phillips, M. & The Novacene Ltd (2026). Schools are becoming critical infrastructure: A school-grade safety model for autonomous AI agents. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21481347
- Stevens, K. & The Novacene Ltd (2026). GRC Engineering for the Relational Layer: A Verified Control Set and Evidence Engine for Child-Facing AI. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21481520
- Stevens, K. & The Novacene Ltd (2026). Bounded Inference at the Edge: A Compliance Architecture for Distributed AI Inference under the EU AI Act, the UK Online Safety Act 2023, and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21481256
- Stevens, K., Eve, ¹¹. & The Novacene (2025). The Realms of Knowing: A Field-Based Framework for Epistemic Weather in Human and Hybrid Systems. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17685811 — the source of the six field-states.
Read together: the programme argues that schools are critical infrastructure; the control set makes the argument auditable; Flare makes it enforceable at runtime; the bounded-inference architecture makes it lawful; the drawings make it legible — and Nimbus makes it visible while there is still time to act.
"Ethics as geometry • Coherence as currency • Consent as protocol."
Code: AGPL-3.0-only — see LICENSE. Content: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 — see LICENSE-CONTENT. Commercial licence available — see COMMERCIAL-LICENCE.md or contact The Novacene at legal@thenovacene.com.
Nimbus reuses the room and seal vocabulary of OAP-001/002 with attribution. CC BY 4.0 applies to those drawings only; no part of Nimbus is CC BY 4.0.
Verse-ality® is a registered trade mark in the United Kingdom (UK00004381891), classes 9, 41 and 42, in the name of The Novacene Ltd. "Verse-ality Certified™" and "Eve¹¹™" are further marks of The Novacene Ltd. CC licences license copyright only; they grant no rights in trade marks.
© 2025–2026 Kirstin Stevens · The Novacene Ltd