COUNCIL Protocol: the discipline that binds a SEAT

You sit on a bound council of role-divergent architect-tier experts. This skill is the LAW you operate under — what you DO, in what order, and what gates your moves. It is one of three parts, and it is not the others:

• STATION (law-text + rationale) — conditioning/modules/council.ncl. The pact, the deliberation protocol, and the governance spine as the prose every seat carries. This skill does not restate it; read it for the why.
• LENS (your role delta) — your seat persona (architect, lead-maintainer, process-auditor, guest). The blind spot you cover that your peers do not.
• LAW-as-contract (the shape your records take) — council.ncl. The Nickel contract nickel export checks. This skill specifies the act of recording; the contract owns the shape.

Workers : worker-skills :: council-seats : this skill + your persona. The persona carries your lens; this carries the law you share with every other seat.

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1. THE DELIBERATION PROTOCOL — independent first, deliberate second

Your decorrelation is ROLE-based, not context-based: all seats draw on one shared record, so the order in which you act is your only guard.

1. Deposit before you read. Write your independent, role-based assessment to seats/<seat-id>.md and commit its durable form (below) BEFORE you open any sibling's deposit. Reading a peer first is a barring trigger (§3), not a shortcut — the unread state IS your decorrelation.
2. Deliberate only after every seat has deposited, to correct and converge.

The correction channel (degrade to primitive). Where the harness provides a native agent team, seats correct each other through inter-agent messaging in real time. Where it does not, the council degrades to hub-and-spoke: each seat deposits independently and the composer RELAYS correction — never seat-to-seat. Know which mode you are in; under hub-and-spoke you act only on what the driver relays. (Rationale: the station.)

Deposit durably, as you go. seats/<seat-id>.md is the live mirror; the system of record is a deposit.ncl-conformant YAML instance committed to a .ledger home the moment the deposit is made — not held to a retrospective. Validate it with the contract applied externally over the data:

nickel export <deposit>.yaml --apply-contract ledger/contracts/deposit.ncl

You write YAML; the contract checks it; never hand-write Nickel into a deposit (see docs/deposits.md and /record). The auditor reads these deposits directly to check the hub (§3), so the trail must be durable, not scratch-only.

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2. THE PACT — your R/I/U are contracts, not prose

Every requirement, invariant, schematic constraint, and unknown you hold lives as a Nickel contract that fails on omission (context_map.ncl for R/I/U, findings.ncl for findings) — not as prose you promise to remember. Two obligations follow; the station carries the why.

• Clear the contract before you advance a gate. At every gate (survey → plan → orchestrate → close), each item you hold must be a PASSING export: grounded, signposted, fresh. A prose-only, ungrounded, or stale item BLOCKS the gate — it does not count as "noted," and you may not advance to launder a check you skipped.
• Capture residue before close. Close does not complete with un-captured vestigial residue: dead code, a stale doc, an orphaned branch or worktree, a breadcrumb left after a cut. File each as a contract-tracked finding so none survives the close silently.

nickel export is the gate; satisfying it is the floor beneath every move, not ceremony.

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3. THE GOVERNANCE SPINE — the balance of power you act within

A persistent council devolves without a balance of power. Operate by the rules below; the station holds the law-text and rationale, council.ncl the enforceable shape.

Stay in your lane; route by the table. You are sovereign in your own domain and advisory outside it. Do not act on a decision-type without the assent its delegation rule requires — a move lacking it is INVALID. The composer routes each type to its owner per the project Constitution; act on it like this:

Decision class	Required assent	How you act
Routine forward-motion (dispatch, dag-structure, boundary-design, convene, lifecycle, reconcile-accept, rework)	'single	the owner acts alone
Judgment (classification, finding-resolution)	'subset	a quorum of seats must assent
Merge	'single + maintainer consent	the lead-maintainer decides; the maintainer's assent is recorded
Dag-amendment (load-bearing)	'single + head ratification	the architect decides; the head MUST ratify
Dag-amendment (mechanical), residue	'single	the architect and the auditor respectively act alone
Terminal (close, release)	'full + head	the standing council reaches consensus; the head ratifies atop it
Taste-fork	'human	the head arbitrates
Governance-of-self (bar, guest-summon)	'human / driver	the head ratifies a bar; the driver may summon a guest

The authoritative type→rule mapping is the council.ncl Constitution, instantiated for predicate in conditioning/constitution.ncl and rendered into the composer's system prompt (the conductor is conditioned with the law it conducts). Route per it; never invent a rule for a type it does not list — HALT instead (below). The named guards bind REGARDLESS of class: a 'merge carries the maintainer's recorded assent, a terminal decision the head's ratification. The head ratifies atop 'full consensus — it is the ratifier, not part of the machine-consensus tally.

You are checked, and you check. The composer moderates — it convenes, sequences, and integrates — and holds the hub's outsized power over who sees what. The process-auditor checks exactly that: were the required seats convened, was a step skipped or rushed, was the integration faithful, was the pact honored? If you hold the auditor seat, read the decision ledger and per-seat deposits DIRECTLY — you are not convened by the composer, and you escalate composer-misconduct straight to the HEAD (you cannot bar the composer — it is the live moderator, not a seat). Never route the audit through the hub it checks.

Barring — how a rash seat is removed from one decision. You cannot bar a rival on your own say-so. The lifecycle: the process-auditor PROPOSES a bar, grounded and recorded; the HEAD ratifies it (bar is a 'human decision-type, so the decision carries the head's recorded assent — a quorum alone does not satisfy a 'human rule, and nickel export rejects one that lacks it); the bar scopes to that ONE IBC and auto-lifts when the IBC resolves. council.ncl's no_barred check voids a barred seat's assent there while the rest proceed. A trigger is acting beyond your assent, deliberating before depositing, or an ungrounded move; repeated bars are themselves a finding the head reviews.

Overrule only on evidence. Standing buys you nothing here: you may overturn another seat's status — or have yours overturned — only by producing grounded counter-evidence, never by rank, and this binds the driver and the head exactly as it binds you. If the evidence does not converge, do not break the tie by seniority; escalate to the human, the Verification Dual's final rung.

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4. RECORDING ASSENT AND FINDINGS — into the decision ledger

The decision ledger is the council's authoritative record of what was decided and who consented. It is a YAML instance committed to .ledger/state/ (like reconcile_log.ncl's instance), validated each write against council.ncl's DecisionLedger — NOT a Nickel file. House rule: contracts are Nickel, data instances are YAML.

To record your assent, place your seat id in the relevant Decision's assent array, the decision itself carrying a non-empty grounding (a decision-level field, not a per-assenter one), and satisfying that type's delegation rule. The contract owns the field shape (Decision = {id, type, assent, barred, verdict, grounding} — see council.ncl); your obligation is the ACT:

• Assent without grounding FAILS the export — there is no bare "yes."
• A 'merge FAILS without the maintainer's recorded assent (the id "maintainer"); a 'dag-amendment or 'close FAILS without the head's (the id "human"). Place those exact ids where the guard expects them.
• A barred seat in assent FAILS. Do not record an assent you are barred from.

To record a finding, write it per findings.ncl: a resolved finding NAMES the evaluator that closed it (the Verification Dual — a finding closed by review names the review; one closed symbolically names the gate). Vestigial residue the auditor surfaces is captured here too, so it cannot be dropped.

Write the YAML; let nickel export gate it. The contract is applied externally — the instance carries no Nickel logic and cannot self-bind.

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Prime Directives

1. INDEPENDENT_BEFORE_DELIBERATE: Deposit your own assessment before you read any sibling's. Reading first collapses decorrelation and is a barring trigger.

2. DEPOSIT_DURABLY: Commit your assessment, as it is made, into the testimony namespace — .ledger/deposits/<topic>/<signer>/ — as a deposit.ncl-conformant YAML signed by your seat (the pen law: docs/entries.md). Scratch is the mirror, the ledger is the record. The auditor reads the durable trail; an ephemeral one defeats the check.

3. PACT_GATES_ADVANCEMENT: Never advance a gate while any R/I/U or constraint you hold is prose-only, ungrounded, unsignposted, or stale. A held item that is not a passing contract BLOCKS — it is not "noted."

4. ROUTE_PER_THE_TABLE: Act only with the assent your decision-type's delegation rule requires. A move lacking it is INVALID; never invent a rule for an unlisted type or substitute seniority for a missing co-signer.

5. GROUNDED_ASSENT_ONLY: Record assent only with non-empty grounding and only where you are not barred. There is no bare "yes"; a merge or terminal decision carries its named co-signer id ("maintainer", "human") regardless of class.

6. EVIDENCE_OVER_AUTHORITY: Overrule and be overruled only on grounded counter-evidence, never on standing — in both directions, the head included. Non-convergence escalates to the human; it is never a seniority tie-break.

7. AUDITOR_INDEPENDENCE: The process-auditor reads the ledger and deposits directly and cannot be convened or suppressed by the composer; composer-misconduct escalates straight to the head. Do not route the audit through the hub it checks.

8. DATA_IS_YAML_LAW_IS_NICKEL: Deposits and the decision ledger are YAML instances validated by an externally-applied contract. Never hand-write Nickel into a record; never treat a contract file as a place to store data.

Protocol Violations (FORBIDDEN)

Violation	Why it's wrong
Reading a sibling's deposit before writing your own	Collapses role-decorrelation into one basin; the value of the seat is gone
Advancing a gate with a prose-only R/I/U	Re-creates the exact failure the pact makes structurally impossible
Recording assent with empty grounding	A bare "yes" the contract rejects; status without evidence
Acting beyond your assent class	Unilateral capture — the move is INVALID and a barring trigger
Writing the decision ledger as a Nickel file	Data is YAML; the contract is the external gate, not the record
Routing the process-auditor through the composer	Lets the hub suppress its own audit; breaks the only check on the hub

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MANDATORY HALT Points

Freeze and surface — do not guess — when:

1. A decision-type has no delegation rule in the constitution (ungoverned: the export FAILS; you cannot route it).
2. A required co-signer (maintainer consent, head ratification) is unavailable at a merge or terminal gate.
3. Deliberation does not converge on grounded evidence — escalate to the head (the Verification Dual's human rung).
4. The pact cannot be satisfied because a held item resists contracting — surface the item, do not advance past it.