Governance
How Meridian is governed
Meridian is health-adjacent information infrastructure. It earns trust by being explicit about what it is, who is accountable for its content, how that content is kept accurate, and how it survives any single maintainer.
Mission
Meridian exists to make community mental health resources in New Hampshire findable, accurate, and current — so that anyone navigating the system, and any clinician supporting them, can trust what they read here.
What Meridian is deliberately not
Meridian is an information resource, not a clinical service. It does not provide diagnosis, treatment, clinical advice, crisis intervention, or referrals, and using it does not create a clinician–client relationship. Content is educational and general; it is never a substitute for the judgment of a licensed professional who knows the individual situation.
For immediate help, call or text 988 or NH Rapid Response at 833-710-6477.
Editorial board
Each seat is accountable for a specific content domain and a review cadence. Seats are listed even while unfilled, so the map of who is responsible for what is complete and public. Interested in a seat? See editorial contact below.
Seat open
RecruitingEditor-in-chief — overall editorial standards, final sign-off on clinical content, and conflict-of-interest review.
Reviews the full content inventory on a rolling quarterly basis.
Seat open
RecruitingClinical content — psychoeducation articles, screening-tool descriptions, and treatment explainers for clinical accuracy and current best practice.
Reviews clinical articles and tool copy at least every 180 days.
Seat open
RecruitingResource directory & catchment data — listing accuracy, program eligibility, and the NH community mental health center network.
Confirms directory sourcing on the freshness cadence (90–180 days).
Seat open
RecruitingCrisis & safety content — crisis pathways, safety-planning tools, and every emergency phone number surfaced on the platform.
Verifies all crisis contacts and pathways every 90 days.
Seat open
RecruitingLived-experience & accessibility — plain-language review, cultural responsiveness, and readability of client-facing material.
Reviews client-facing guides and tools at least every 180 days.
Content review protocol
Every piece of content — articles, guides, tools, catchment pages, and crisis resources — moves through the same lifecycle, tracked in an internal review register.
01Assigned to a domain owner
Every article, guide, tool, catchment page, and crisis resource is assigned to the board seat accountable for its domain, with a due date recorded in the content_reviews register.
02Reviewed against a source
The reviewer checks the content for clinical accuracy, current best practice, and working links and phone numbers — against a named, authoritative source, not from memory.
03Signed off and dated
On completion the reviewer records notes and a completion date. The review interval depends on content type: 90 days for crisis and safety content, 180 days for everything else.
04Surfaced when overdue
When a review comes due it moves to the top of the internal queue automatically. Overdue clinical or crisis content is flagged for expedited handling — nothing sits unexamined long enough to quietly go stale.
The directory-specific side of this — sourcing, verification, and the freshness cadence — is described in detail on our methodology page.
Succession plan
Meridian is built to outlast any single person, including its founder. Durability is a design goal, not an afterthought.
No single point of failure
Access to the domain, hosting, database, and source repository is documented and recoverable by more than one trusted person. The inventory of where those credentials live — never the credentials themselves — is maintained in the private OPERATIONS.md runbook.
Documented handoff
Deployment, content-update, and emergency procedures are written down so a new maintainer can operate the platform without tribal knowledge. Architecture and deployment are documented in ARCHITECTURE.md and DEPLOYMENT.md.
Editorial continuity
The editorial board is designed to outlast any individual member. The editor-in-chief seat holds authority to seat and re-seat other roles, and an unfilled seat's review responsibilities fall back to the editor-in-chief until it is filled.
Graceful degradation
If maintenance lapses, the platform is built to fail safe: content carries visible last-reviewed dates, crisis numbers are checked most frequently, and stale entries are flagged rather than silently trusted.
Editorial inquiries & corrections
Spotted an inaccuracy, or want to discuss editorial standards or a board seat? Email editorial@meridian-nh.org or use the contact form. Editorial inquiries are acknowledged within 5 business days. Factual corrections to published content are prioritized and, where verifiable, applied within 2 business days.