Read this before the piece. It introduces the operating contract, the ledger you are reading from, and the design system your output must align with. The instructions summarize; the series governs. When this page and a series document disagree, file the conflict and follow the series.
The single operating contract is BP v2. It consolidates the agent instructions, governance mechanics, repository conventions, and piece authoring guide into one document. The machine-facing distillation lives at the repository root as AGENTS.md; the full text will be published at techne.coop/commons/bp/ as BP lands in the series. What follows is an orientation, not a substitute.
The protocol's first premise is the system's first principle applied to the build itself: agents draft, surface, and guide; humans decide, sign, and govern. Nothing an agent writes becomes a record, a policy, or a public claim until an organizer adopts it. Adoption is a visible act in the history.
The piece is the unit of work. It is a validated YAML entry in the ledger, small enough for one session to advance and complete enough for a stranger to pick up. A piece is not done until its upstream dependencies are verified. The validator enforces schema compliance, dependency acyclicity, and proof consistency on every change.
SUB-01, B-03, G-G.A stop follows one shape:
A session begins the same way every time, because the agent beginning it remembers nothing. Context is assembled, not recalled, and the assembly order is part of the contract.
AGENTS.md at the repository root, which points to BP v2. If the two ever disagree, BP governs and the disagreement is filed.A session closes by committing with provenance, updating status by commit, filing any open questions as stop cards rather than resolving them, and leaving a short note of what was tried and abandoned, so the next session inherits judgment and not just files.
Authored-by: build-agent / SUB-01.
The Almanac reads a validated YAML ledger at almanac-ledger.yaml and stands at /commons/build/. Work is organized into beds: dependency-ordered sequences of pieces that advance in parallel once their ground is verified. There are no dates. The only scheduling constraint is the readiness condition on each piece.
The counts in this section are level with the ledger at commit 6c1a6d9 of 2026-09-02, the third resync (X-34), with this piece’s own entry counted; the earlier two were X-14 and X-17. The ledger holds 183 items: 19 governing documents (the eleven series artifacts, which include the PATRONAGE and TREASURY module specifications grafted 2026-07-22, AGY grafted 2026-07-27 and standing proposed rather than adopted, and PUB, plus STANDING, GUILD, TRANSDUCER, MATRIX, the Maturity Model, and the three governance drafts ROO, ORDER, and EGRESS, each drafted inside the bed it would open) and 164 work pieces and proofs across sixteen beds and the proof set. The validated STATUS.md marks the state: 35 drafted, 40 anticipated, 108 open, 0 filed. Of the open pieces, 49 carry a verified mark and 53 a delivered mark: the Substrate work is verified end to end, Belong is verified through B-07 with two drafted pieces behind it, and the Gather, Find, Shell, Agency, Lexicon, Guild, Transducer, and Cross-cutting beds are verified or delivered and wait on proof attestation. One proof of ten is attested, G0, the security floor. Five pieces name a blocker in the status field: S-01 and S-02 hold on the Q3 counting rules, T-01 on TREASURY-POLICY adoption, T-05 on redeemability, and SMS-03 on the word its status carries. The A bed is held by none of these: it waits on a single decision about authority, described in AGY §5. The Standing bed stands wholly anticipated and the Guild bed's rail pieces with it, because their governing documents are proposals rather than adoptions; the Matrix bed is proposed and adopted by nothing; the Governance and Horizon beds govern nothing at all.
| bed | pieces | proof | ready when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series | SER · PRD · BP · UI · IM · VS · AM · PATRONAGE · TREASURY · AGY · PUB | — | 11 drafted drafted |
| Substrate | SUB-01 through SUB-05 | G0 | verified through G0 attested |
| Belong | B-01 through B-09 | G-B | G0 attested; B-08 and B-09 drafted, adoption by the steward |
| Gather | G-01 through G-04 | G-G | G0 attested |
| Find | F-01 through F-05 | G-F | opened by the steward’s direction, 2026-07-22 |
| Share | S-01 through S-03 | G-S | Q3 counting rules adopted open · Q3 |
| Treasury | T-01 through T-09 | G-T | TREASURY-POLICY adopted; read-only rail credentials open · policy |
| Shell | U-01 through U-22, less U-16 | — | built 2026-07-24; refiled to its own lane 2026-07-27 (X-13) |
| Agency | A-01 through A-04 | G-A | AGY grafted; G0 attested. A-03 waits on the first grant |
| Lexicon | L-01 through L-09 | G-L | Ground and Craft adopted by the steward 2026-08-08 |
| Standing | STANDING · V-01 through V-04 · G-V | G-V | STANDING adopted anticipated |
| Governance | ROO · ORDER · EGRESS | — | three drafts, none adopted; adoption is a board act under Bylaws §3.13 drafted |
| Guild | GUILD · P-01 through P-12 | — | GUILD adopted; the terms authored by people. P-07 through P-12 delivered or verified ahead of it anticipated |
| Transducer | TRANSDUCER · TR-01 through TR-12 | G-I | grafted 2026-08-17 on the steward’s word; TR-02 verified waits on his walk |
| Horizon | MM · MM-01 · U-23 through U-27 · U-29 · U-30 · U-32 · A-05 | — | nothing in the bed governs; the model would take effect only by member vote |
| Matrix | MATRIX · M-01 through M-05 · SMS-01 through SMS-05 | — | the frame proposed 2026-08-19 and adopted by nothing; SMS-03 open on the word its status carries anticipated |
| Record | R-01 · R-02 | — | opened 2026-09-03 by the roadmap’s batch 2; no schema, no policy; the first minutes row is the Secretary’s; R-02 reads the record back on the record page |
| Cross-cutting | X-01 through X-26 · X-28 through X-34 · X-38 through X-41 · DOC-01 · FORMATION-01 | G-R | Various; see ledger |
A proof lands as a gate.attested event, never as an automatic merge. Each proof requires human attestation before the next bed opens. G-B, G-G, and G-F attest on the steward’s personal run-through (amended 2026-07-22: the August 14 gathering is no longer a readiness condition for anything). G-A is the one proof the steward cannot attest alone: its sentence requires a member who is not the steward to direct the instrument, which is the whole claim the module makes. The run-through is the guide to that walk.
Before claiming a piece, check the signal loop at /commons/build/ for named open conditions. An open piece bears its blocker in the status field: open · Q3 means the piece waits on the Q3 counting-rules decision. Do not claim an open piece; file a stop card if you believe the condition is resolvable.
The design system at techne.coop/design-system is the principal alignment resource for any page deployed to techne.coop. Agent-produced HTML must align with Techne v4 as documented there. What follows is a working reference. The full specification is UI v1 (Drafted). When in doubt, match the patterns of existing pages over inventing new ones.
Alignment is more than tokens. For the language, voice, and identity of the cooperative, reference the Commonplace at techne.coop/commonplace. For the register of the Common Information System, the commons as deployed on /intranet/, the word is settled in the Lexicon at techne.coop/commons/build/lexicon.
#0F0F12 · Light: #F7F5F0#16161B · Light: #FCFBF8#08080A · Light: #EBE7DFdrafted chips, decide panelsdata-tint on section elements.§N) and left-bordered heading.Every claim wears its status. Use the chip component with the correct mark. Never omit a status chip from an artifact header or piece entry.
Every page carries a mode toggle. Store the preference in localStorage under the key techne-mode (values: dark or light). Apply it early in a blocking script to prevent flash. The topbar button switches the data-mode attribute on <html> and updates the stored value.
<em> for first use of key terms and for genuine emphasis in running prose. Not bold.
The build target is Techne-Co-op/techne.coop, served as GitHub Pages at techne.coop. All HTML is static and inline-styled (no build step, no framework). The CNAME is techne.coop; HTTPS is enforced. Commits to main deploy directly.
CLAUDE.md points agent runtimes at AGENTS.md.commons/index.html.ujujwgopdwirebgcpekc) holds the live data. This repository holds the public face and the governance documents that the database implements. Schema work belongs in migration files; the HTML here displays what the schema produces.
Branch from main using the piece address as the branch name: git checkout -b SUB-01. Every commit on a piece branch carries the piece address in the message. The PR title names the address and summarizes the deliverable. After organizer approval and validator green, squash-merge to main. GitHub Pages deploys within 60 seconds.
The CIS reference site (Techne-Co-op/cis-reference) provides a live schema and policy reference, with row counts fetched from Supabase. It is a companion instrument, not a build target for pieces in this ledger.
The text below is reproduced verbatim from BP v2 §10. It lives at the repository root as AGENTS.md, where agent harnesses load it automatically. This document governs; the distillation summarizes. When the two disagree, the disagreement is filed and BP governs.
READ this file summarizes BP v2; BP governs. read your piece and every artifact it cites before any code. STAND you are a session-scoped instrument: no memory, no standing, no authority. organizers decide and adopt. WORK one piece per branch, named by its address. commits carry your authorship trailer and the address. STOP schema, permissions, money, membership, governance, new dependencies, public names, artifact conflicts: stop and ask rather than invent. file the stop card: standing-in / found / the question / a default. MARK drafts are drafts until a person adopts them. simulated data never writes back to live records. every claim wears its status mark. STYLE subchapter k vocabulary only. no emoji. no em dashes. two grammars: document 760-920px, instrument HUD. DONE validator green, upstream verified, status changed by commit. if unsure whether done: not done.
An agent that stops is doing its job. An agent that invents is doing someone else's. The build goes fast precisely because the boundary is bright: inside a piece's citations, full speed; at the boundary, a card, a question, and a person.
Added August 2026, at the steward's direction. Some remaining work advances as batches: Nou, the runtime instrument, coordinates fleets of session-scoped build agents and delivers each batch as one pull request. Everything above still binds every agent in the fleet. This section adds only the coordination layer.
Orchestration completes agent-completable work. Pieces held on a board vote, a steward decision, or a second human attestor are not batch candidates; they stay on the Almanac with their blocker named. A faster fleet does not move a human boundary.
Added August 2026 as X-23, from the federation-alignment guidance of 2026-08-22; issue #218 is the public anchor. Every claim on this estate cites its authority. This section states how fine that citation runs today, and how fine it becomes when the estate's own history enters the Common Information System, so the present grain stands as doctrine rather than habit.
The present grain is documentary. A claim cites an instrument and a date: the steward's direction of 2026-08-22, Bylaws v2.1 §7.1, the ledger entry at X-19. That is the whole discipline, and for a documentary estate it is sufficient. Every artifact here is a document, a document's authority is another document, and instrument plus date resolves any claim to a text a reader can open and a day it was recorded. Nothing on these pages carries a figure whose source is finer than the document that states it, so no citation needs to be finer either.
The record this estate will one day feed keeps a finer grain. The Information Model's first law is that state is a tally over events, recomputed and never stored, so any figure traces to the events that produced it. When the build's history is ingested into the CIS, the ingest adopts bitemporal record-keeping: every entry carries two times, when the thing happened and when the record learned of it, because the two differ and the difference is information. A correction is legible only when both times are kept; the mistaken entry was faithful to what was known on the day it was written, and the learning better has its own date. Raw records land whole: a transcript, a filing, a direction given in a channel enters as it is, never summarized at the door. Derived beliefs, the counts and statuses and narratives computed from raw records, are tallies that cite the raw records they read. The instrument-and-date citations these pages carry today convert without loss: the instrument becomes the raw record, the date becomes the second of the two times.
None of this asks for new vocabulary. The Lexicon's record section already holds the words: the event written once and never edited, the append-only log, the correction as a compensating event that points back at what it corrects, the tally by which any figure traces to the events that produced it, and provenance as a mark every event carries. The tally vocabulary anticipated the bitemporal split before this section named it, which is what a good register does.
And none of it changes tooling now. Citations on this estate remain instrument and date; no schema moves, no validator gains a check, no page changes form. This section exists so that when ingest comes, its record-keeping arrives as the implementation of a stated doctrine rather than as a decision made inside a migration.
Added August 2026, at the steward's direction, on the federation-alignment record (#218, following #217). The estate already runs this way; this section writes the practice down so it stands as instrument rather than habit. It grants nothing. Authority lives in the grant register at /commons/agency/grants/ (A-05). This section states only how an agent is known, whose act its work becomes, and where the boundary stands.
An attestation is identity, not authority. It says who an agent is and who answers for it; it says nothing about what the agent may do. What an agent may do is the grant register's to report, a person's to widen, and one word to end.
Added August 2026 as X-26, on the federation-alignment record (#218, following #217). Every adoption on this estate already leaves a receipt. The merge commit records who adopted, what address, when, and the state of the checks at the moment of the act. This section states the receipt as doctrine, so a future event-shaped record of the build can be derived from the history the estate already keeps, and no new tooling rides the piece.
Merge is the act of adoption; §1 says so, and §10 restates it at the identity layer. What neither section says is that the act writes itself down. A merge to main under the conventions of §6 carries everything an event needs, and carries it in git, an append-only history the estate already trusts:
Stated as doctrine, the receipt means the build's adoption history already exists as a record. The Information Model's first law is that state is a tally over events, and the Lexicon's record section holds the vocabulary: the event written once and never edited, the append-only log, the tally by which a figure traces to the events that produced it. The merge history is that log for adoptions. What the estate has adopted is a tally over its merge commits, recomputable by anyone with a clone and no credentials at all. When the build's history enters the Common Information System under §9, each receipt converts to an adoption event without loss, because the four fields above are already in it.
The discipline this section asks for is only care with what is already true: branches named by address, the authorship trailer on agent commits, merges by a named person with the validator green. Break any of those and the receipt degrades from record to guess. Keep them, and no receipt ever needs writing, because the act of adoption is the act of writing it.
Added August 2026 as X-26, from the same federation-alignment guidance. The Verification Spec governs what done means; this section governs how a claim of done is worded. Three rules, each already in force somewhere in this estate's history, written down so they bind everywhere.
scripts/validate.py over one tree, and a report that says so is a measurement. Style lint, the validator, and continuous integration are three different checks; naming which one ran is the difference between a measurement and an inference. What was not run is reported as not run, and a claim with no named check behind it does not enter the record.
The word verified itself stays where the Verification Spec puts it: with a person. TR-02 stands delivered today, its generator run and its evidence recorded, and its verified mark waits on the steward walking the acceptance and saying the word. That packet is open, remains the steward's, and this section neither closes it nor could. Machinery can deliver, measure, and report. Verification is a person's act, the same boundary §1 draws around adoption, met again at the end of the work instead of the beginning.
Name the check, name the state it ran against, name what was not checked. A report built that way survives its author: a stranger can rerun it, dispute it, or extend it. A report built any other way is a feeling with a timestamp.
Added September 2026 as X-33, from the plan published at /commons/build/roadmap/, prepared on the steward’s direction of 2026-09-02 in #intranet-dev to orchestrate and schedule the completion of the commons build. No instrument on the estate defined public beta before that plan; what follows is the plan’s proposal. It becomes the estate’s definition only when the steward adopts it by merging this section. Until then it is a proposal, carried here so an agent meets it where §3 already sends one to read before a piece.
Public beta, proposed: the state in which every surface a member can reach says truthfully what it is, every agent-completable piece is delivered and green, the four proofs that wait on no board act are attested, and the beds that wait on the board are marked as waiting rather than missing. Six conditions state that plainly.
| # | condition | whose act | measured by |
|---|---|---|---|
| B1 | Every open · delivered piece that one person can walk alone has a verdict: verified, or a named defect filed as a packet. |
the steward, walking (X-22 sittings) | ledger marks; packet.verified events; the walk page |
| B2 | Every agent-completable piece in the plan’s batch list is delivered on main with the full CI battery green. | agents, under the merge grant | scripts/validate.py, verify.yml, one reader over each batch |
| B3 | G-B, G-G, G-F attested; G-L attested once L-01 through L-06 are verified. | the steward (G-B needs a second person) | gate.attested events |
| B4 | The Almanac prose and this page state the ledger’s state on the day, and the record-keeping loop is live so a board meeting and its minute have a place in the record. | agents; the Secretary writes the first row | the pages; minutes.* events |
| B5 | The public surfaces carry one beta mark that says what is and is not in force, in words the steward chose. | drafted by an agent, named by the steward | the mark on /commons/ and /commons/build/ |
| B6 | No stale claim: no page says a thing is adopted, live, or verified that the ledger and the record do not say. | agents audit; the steward rules on contradictions | the almanac audit; the design audit; a manual claims pass |
The batches that deliver B1 through B6 run on a schedule, not this page: the plan’s own sections 3 and 5 hold the batch list and the automation that works it. One rule from that schedule matters here, because it is the boundary this section would otherwise leave unstated: the 45-minute loop merges only Tier A batches, and only with the full check battery green, and holds every Tier C batch, the ones touching a public claim, for the steward’s word. A faster fleet does not move that boundary.
Ordered by what it unblocks in the plan. Each is one act; none needs construction first.
ready_when names: COUNTING-RULES v1, TREASURY-POLICY, redeemability with counsel, the STANDING, GUILD, MATRIX, and TRANSDUCER documents, and the series documents still drafted. None of these gates beta under the six conditions above; each stands on the beta mark of B5 as waiting.
It does not define beta for anyone but this build, and it adopts nothing on its own account: the definition above is a proposal until the steward’s merge, per §1 and §11. It moves no human boundary. The board’s adoptions, the steward’s verified word, and the second human’s presence stay exactly where the ledger already puts them.