-The "Hourglass policy bot" is a per-minute "cron bot" that looks at
-the recent succession of measures to decide whether or not "usage" is
-happening and accumulate usage periods into the current daily usage
-time measure. It is the policy contol bot that performs the control
-actions of closing or opening the network for traffic.
+The operator view includes display of thecurrent usage, a control for
+"open override", an "ascii art" graph showing a history of usage
+timelines, and the weekly control policy setup and control.
+
+<<<<<<<<<<
+=== Hourglass Software Architecture
+
+This policy control is accomplished by *Hourglass* as a software
+architecture with three interlinked components that are on a "router"
+that networking-wise is in between the sub network to control and the
+Internet.
+
+ * One component, the *Hourglass listener daemon* continuously
+ monitors the network and generates a per-minute log of how many
+ "network packets" there were in that minute. This is the measure
+ Hourglass uses to determine whether the network is in use or not so
+ as to allow for having a limit on the accumulated usage during the
+ open time.
+
+ * Another component, the *Hourglass policy bot*, is a per-minute
+ "cron bot". It looks at the recent succession of activity measures
+ to decide whether or not "usage" is happening, and then accumulates
+ usage periods into the current total daily usage time measure. It
+ regularly considers changing the networking settings as a matter of
+ effectuating the (then) current policy.
+
+ * The third component, *Hourglass web service*, provides tailored
+ support for operators to view and modify the policy remotely. The
+ applicable policy is actually held in plain text on the deployment
+ host and it may of course also be directly modified with a text
+ editor.