informed-decision/SCOPE.md

SCOPE

Implemented-and-first-cut boundary for agents and contributors. Aspirational direction belongs in INTENT.md; the current stage belongs in GOAL.md; current work and gates belong in workplans/.

Status — 2026-09-09

Specification and declaration are complete; no service is deployed.

What exists and is tested: the layer and stance declarations (layer.yaml, pep-stance.yaml, informed_decision/stance.py), the governed canonicalizer and schema, and the four specs under docs/specs/. 46 tests pass.

What does not exist: any HTTP surface, any storage, any UI, any deployment. The walking skeleton is INFD-WP-0001-T08 and is gated on an external decision (§"Open" below).

One-liner

informed-decision is the presentation and binding surface for decisions: it renders a Decision Memo to the human who holds the mandate, records what was shown, and binds their identity to the act — and owns the browser-facing approver UI that approval-engine deliberately does not contain.

Layer

PEP-shaped, ruled by GH-DEC-2026-012. Not an Engine. Companion §5 owed, statute §6.4 in full. Declared in layer.yaml in this repository's own voice.

It emits one PIP-like fact — what was presented — as a claim, under three limits that are the substance of the permission rather than caveats on it:

1. the claim carries presentation and nothing else, and must never carry, restate, summarise or imply a decision or verdict;
2. the claim must never be an input to the decision it presents for;
3. the evidence copy reaches audit-core independently of this repository.

Limit 2 is load-bearing: the argument that a renderer attesting its own rendering is not self-dealing was accepted because that limit holds.

Core Idea

A decision surface is not a workflow engine and not a decision point. This repository owns the Decision Memo object, the presentation record, the canonicalization producing view_hash / awareness_hash, the disposition vocabulary, and the evidence bundle export. It does not evaluate whether an act is permitted, does not hold approval current-state, and does not archive the trail.

In Scope — first cut (Stage 1)

Built and tested:

• Canonicalization of the binding and awareness documents, with the three published vectors reproducing byte for byte and all four isolation properties pinned (tests/test_canonicalize.py).
• The Decision Memo schema and worked examples, governed under schemas/.
• The unreachable-engine stance map, built to v0.8 obligation 3, with published-equals-shipped asserted by test (tests/test_layer_conformance.py).

Specified, not built:

• The presentation record: what was rendered, to whom, when, in which locale and UI release.
• Required-highlight acknowledgment as a precondition of binding.
• The disposition vocabulary and its legality tables. Only accept reaches approval-engine; return, discuss, escalate and the rest are memo-level.
• The browser-facing OIDC client: authorization-code + S256 PKCE against key-cape, scopes [openid, approval:read, approval:approve].
• An L3 approver surface calling approval-engine's approval-entry mutation.
• The evidence bundle as an offline-verifiable export.

Out of Scope

• Authorization decisions — access-engine, always and only (statute §6).
• The approval object, its state machine, validity and consumption — approval-engine. Never cached, never inferred, never approval:consume.
• Approval doctrine — gate-house.
• Identity and authentication — key-cape. Imported, never invented. The assurance shape is key-cape's and is cited, not restated.
• The evidence archive — audit-core.
• Credentials materialized after a decision — secrets-engine.
• Notification transport, ticketing, general workflow.
• An approvals inbox. Foreclosed upstream as well as here: approval-engine exposes get-by-id only and will not add a list.
• L4/L5, QES, QTSP, qualified archival retention.
• The mandate graph — so a Stage 1 escalate is an assertion, not a verified claim.

What this repository does not claim

Stated here because a scope file that only lists capabilities overstates them.

• The decision path is not validated. GH-DEC-2026-010 requires a decision be attributable to access-engine; no consumer can satisfy that today because the envelope is unsigned (FLEX-WP-0024). This surface records decision_attributable: false and must not describe validation as complete.
• The residual is open. A compromised surface can present X and attest Y. GH-DEC-2026-012 states it is not closed and does not credit this repository with closing it.
• view_hash is not inside the approval entry. POST /entries discards its body by design. Correlation is (approval_id, subject, approved_at), so an auditor holding only the approval object cannot reach the presentation.
• Commitment-only evidence is not reconstructability. GH-DEC-2026-014 granted it for Stage 1 and bounded it: it satisfies non-alteration, and moves integrity out of our control while leaving availability entirely inside it. The party that can withhold the content is the party the evidence is about. Narrowed by the required existence assertion; not closed.
• The registration-bound tenant is a declared bounded gap, not the terminal state. GH-DEC-2026-013 ruled directory-sourced terminal and admitted key-cape's shape because its distinguishing case fails closed. Build to it as transitional.
• Nothing is deployed, so nothing is observed in production and nothing is contained automatically.

Open

• The deployed origin — the one remaining input to T07. client_id and the callback URI must name a real origin, since redirects match exactly.
• audit-core registration and cadence — the payload is ruled (commitment-only, with the existence assertion); the sender registration and whether reconciliation-plus-heartbeat suits a mixed-volume source are still audit-core's to answer. Required before T08 ships.

Closed 2026-09-10: the human token tenant (GH-DEC-2026-013, key-cape 329e48f) and the evidence payload question (GH-DEC-2026-014).