Open Questions Register for EMEP Development

Tracks unresolved decisions across EMEP phases, including ownership, decision deadlines, impact if unresolved, and current status for each open question.

The open questions register captures every unresolved decision that could block EMEP implementation or affect architecture, licensing, performance, or operations. Each question has an owner, a decision deadline, an impact assessment, and a status so the team can prioritize closure before phase gates.

Open question lifecycle

Questions move through a defined lifecycle from opening to resolution. A question can be decided, deferred to a later phase, or closed if it becomes irrelevant.

Open questions register

ID	Question	Owner	Decision needed by	Impact if unresolved	Status
OQ-001	Which Persian benchmarks to source and how to license them	Research Lead	Phase 4 gate	Cannot evaluate Persian model quality; blocks BenchmarkEngine integration	Under Review
OQ-002	Reference hardware SKUs for phase-1 pilot	Infrastructure Lead	Phase 1 gate	Cannot size ModelRegistry or TensorEngine; blocks capacity planning	Under Review
OQ-003	Final license compatibility matrix for redistribution	Legal Lead	Phase 8 gate	Blocks ModelRegistry redistribution feature; may violate open-source licenses	Under Review
OQ-004	Signing key custody in air-gapped environment (HSM vendor)	Security Lead	Phase 7 gate	Blocks ArtifactStore model signing; prevents offline provenance	Under Review
OQ-005	Phase timing (calendar vs milestone driven)	PM Lead	Phase 0 gate	Affects Roadmap scheduling and resource allocation across all phases	Under Review
OQ-006	Quantization quality regression thresholds (per bit width)	Evaluation Lead	Phase 6 gate	Cannot gate QuantizationEngine releases; risks deploying degraded models	Under Review
OQ-007	Object storage provider for hot/cold tiers	Infrastructure Lead	Phase 6 gate	Blocks ArtifactStore tiering implementation; affects cost and latency	Under Review
OQ-008	Performance thresholds for phase gates (tokens/sec, TTFT)	Evaluation Lead	Phase 4 gate	Cannot define KPI Specification acceptance criteria; blocks phase advancement	Under Review
OQ-009	RPO/RTO targets for disaster recovery	Operations Lead	Phase 8 gate	Blocks DeploymentManager DR design; risks unbounded downtime	Under Review
OQ-010	Persian benchmark data sources (academic vs proprietary)	Research Lead	Phase 4 gate	Affects licensing and reproducibility of BenchmarkEngine results	Under Review
OQ-011	Enterprise pilot customer selection	Business Lead	Phase 8 gate	Blocks Enterprise pilot scoping; delays revenue validation	Under Review
OQ-012	Evaluation harness (LM Evaluation Harness vs HELM vs custom)	Evaluation Lead	Phase 4 gate	Determines EvaluationEngine integration path; affects benchmark coverage	Under Review
OQ-013	Model provenance signing algorithm (ed25519 baseline vs Sigstore)	Security Lead	Phase 7 gate	Affects ArtifactStore signature format and verification tooling	Under Review
OQ-014	CI/CD provider for offline builds	DevOps Lead	Phase 7 gate	Blocks DeploymentManager offline pipeline; affects build reproducibility	Under Review
OQ-015	Chosen vector store for optional RAG (Phase 9)	Architecture Lead	Phase 9 gate	Blocks RAG integration design; affects DatasetRegistry indexing strategy	Under Review
OQ-016	Multi-objective aggregation strategy selection (weighted sum vs Pareto only)	Evolution Lead	Phase 5 gate	Determines FitnessEngine scoring logic; affects EvolutionEngine convergence	Under Review

Status definitions

• Opened: Question identified but not yet under active review.
• Under Review: Owner is actively gathering input and evaluating options.
• Decided: A decision has been made and documented. The question moves to Closed once the decision is implemented.
• Deferred: Decision intentionally postponed to a later phase. The question returns to Under Review when the phase approaches.
• Closed: Question is resolved or no longer relevant.

Impact severity levels

Level	Definition	Example
Critical	Blocks a phase gate or core feature	OQ-004, OQ-008
High	Significantly affects architecture or cost	OQ-002, OQ-007
Medium	Affects implementation details or timeline	OQ-012, OQ-013
Low	Minor preference or optimization	OQ-014

Closure target

All questions marked Critical or High should be resolved before their respective phase gates. Questions marked Medium should be resolved within two weeks of identification. Questions marked Low can be deferred if they do not affect the current phase.

Phase	Questions to close before gate
Phase 0	OQ-005
Phase 1	OQ-002
Phase 4	OQ-001, OQ-008, OQ-010, OQ-012
Phase 5	OQ-016
Phase 6	OQ-006, OQ-007
Phase 7	OQ-004, OQ-013, OQ-014
Phase 8	OQ-003, OQ-009, OQ-011
Phase 9	OQ-015