decision-canon/SCOPE.md

SCOPE

Reviewed: 2026-10-04, against the seed documents at commit ac58582.

One-liner

A research canon for one decision object that can stay light for an informal choice and can carry authority, effects, and learning when the decision governs later decisions.

In scope

• The shared language in Glossary.md.
• The lifecycle, decision kinds, and governance distinctions in DecisionCanon.md.
• The unified decision object in UnifiedDecisionObject.md.
• The loose structural draft in DecisionObjectSchemaDraft.md.
• The research program, hypotheses, and milestone order in ResearchProgram.md.
• Workplans under the prefix DECISION-WP-.

Out of scope

• A running decision service, approval UI, or policy engine. informed-decision owns the presentation and binding surface for decisions that already exist.
• InfoTechCanon shared roots, including identity, evidence, and generic governance vocabulary. Later mappings import them.
• Security authority vocabulary. That canon is security-canon.
• A normative JSON Schema, a conformance suite, or a frozen kernel. DecisionObjectSchemaDraft.md keeps field names unfrozen. Kernel freeze is research milestone M2, after comparative examples.
• Replacing existing decision-analysis methods, requiring quantitative analysis of every decision, forcing one workflow, or collapsing values, evidence, uncertainty, and authority into one score. Those limits are in INTENT.md.

Current state

Milestone M0, the concept seed, is in the repository. DECISION-WP-0002 added six illustrative examples under examples/ and the pressure note reviews/schema-pressure.md. The schema draft is still unfrozen, and there is still no validation command and no normative schema. The next work is DECISION-WP-0003: propose the kernel boundary from that note.

Getting oriented

1. INTENT.md
2. DecisionCanon.md
3. UnifiedDecisionObject.md
4. DecisionObjectSchemaDraft.md
5. ResearchProgram.md
6. workplans/