informed-decision/INTENT.md

project	product	status	intent_version	date	domain	topic_slug	layer	role	standard	companion
informed-decision	Informed Decision	draft	0.1.0	2026-09-09	infotech	netkingdom	Staff	pep-shaped	net-kingdom/canon/standards/	net-kingdom/SECURITY-COMPANION.md

INTENT

This file captures why this repository exists and the kind of system it is meant to become. It is aspirational and stable, not a description of current implementation. Implemented boundary belongs in SCOPE.md; the current stage belongs in GOAL.md; current work belongs in workplans/.

Purpose

informed-decision owns the surface on which a human is shown a decision and binds their identity to it — and owns the evidence that the presentation actually happened.

It answers one question, totally and decidably:

What was this person shown, in what role, at the moment they bound themselves to this act — and can that be proven afterwards?

Nothing else. It does not decide whether the act is permitted (access-engine), does not own the approval object (approval-engine), does not author the doctrine that requires an approval (gate-house), does not authenticate the person (key-cape), and does not archive the trail (audit-core).

Why This Exists

Every layer of the NetKingdom estate has an owner except the one a human actually touches.

approval-engine's INTENT.md names it under Non-Goals, twice and deliberately: "Not a workflow or ticketing system", "Not an approvals inbox or notification surface." That exclusion is correct — an engine that renders its own object is self-dealing — but it leaves a hole, and the hole is now load-bearing:

• approval-engine is a bearer-token resource server with no Ingress, no redirect endpoint and no browser client (deploy/approval-engine.yaml: Namespace + ClusterIP + StatefulSet).
• key-cape (KEY-WP-0013-T02) asked approval-engine for the human approver client's client_id and callback URI on 2026-09-08.
• approval-engine correctly refused to invent them, recording in docs/keycape-service-registrations.md: "The human approver flow therefore belongs to whichever browser-facing approver UI presents approval:approve tokens to this engine. That component is not in this repo."

So the approver UI is not merely missing. It is a named, unassigned dependency that currently blocks an OIDC client registration in another repository. This repository claims it.

The claim is not opportunistic. The founding exploration (history/20260909-initial-exploration/) arrived at the same object from the opposite direction — the German Umlaufmappe / Zeichnungsbuch, a portable decision object that carries a question, the context needed to answer it, the requested act, and a cryptographic binding between identity, what was shown, and what was bound. That is exactly the artifact the estate is missing, and it generalizes past approvals without ever becoming a decision point.

The Concept — the Decision Memo

A Decision Memo is a portable object presented to one human who holds a mandate. It carries:

• a question that must be answered, and a requested act;
• the brief and consequences a reasonable decision-maker needs;
• a packet of hashed documents and highlights pointing into it;
• a binding slice — the identity and scope being committed, which is signed;
• an awareness slice — orientation (proposed role, other roles, other tenants, last session), which is shown and hashed but not signed;
• a route (Zeichnungsleiste), a thread, and a record of every presentation and disposition;
• an append-only evidence chain.

Two hashes are computed over every presentation:

Hash	Over	Signed?
view_hash	the binding document	yes, from organizational level up
awareness_hash	the awareness document	no, unless a field was promoted

view_hash is the mechanism. It is what turns "the file was signed" into "this person, in this role, was shown this view, and bound this act."

Scale Invariance Is the Thesis

One object model, one evidence model, one UX grammar, from a ten-second login to a multi-party instrument:

Level	Act	Typical binding
L0	Informed login / session	acknowledgment / organizational
L1	Privileged authorization (JIT elevation)	organizational
L2	Formal ADR / decision-record accept	organizational / AES
L3	Management approval	organizational / AES
L4	Contract / instrument	AES / QES
L5	Multi-party international instrument	QES per party (horizon, not v1)

If L0 and L3 share the schema, the transitions, and the two hashes, the thesis holds. If they fork, it does not — and the estate has bought a bespoke approvals inbox instead of a decision surface.

The approval approver UI is L3. It is the first stage precisely because it is a real consumer with a real blocking dependency, not a demo.

The Disposition Vocabulary

The differentiator is not another workflow engine. It is that approve/reject is the wrong vocabulary for judgment. The verbs are:

comment · discuss (Rücksprache) · return for improvement (Rückgabe) · forward · escalate · acknowledge (Kenntnisnahme) · accept (Mitzeichnung / Schlusszeichnung) · decline · withdraw · configure

accept on a Kenntnisnahme step is illegal on purpose. Return is success, not failure — a memo sent back for improvement is the surface working.

What informed-decision Owns

• the Decision Memo object, its versions, and its lifecycle;
• the presentation record — what was rendered, to whom, when, in which locale and UI release;
• canonicalization of the binding and awareness documents, and the computation of view_hash / awareness_hash;
• highlight acknowledgment — required highlights acked before a bind is permitted;
• the disposition vocabulary and its legality tables;
• the evidence bundle as an export — the reconstructable answer to who decided what, having seen what;
• the browser-facing OIDC client for human principals, including the client_id and callback URI that key-cape is waiting for;
• the pre-sign / post-sign split: identity and bind-scope are committed; hats, last-used role, and other-tenant orientation are awareness unless explicitly promoted.

What informed-decision Does Not Own

• the decision — access-engine, always and only (statute §6). This repository renders a question and records an answer; it never evaluates whether an actor may do a thing;
• the approval object — approval-engine. This surface calls that engine's mutations with an approval:approve-scoped token; it never holds approval current-state and never answers "is this approval valid";
• approval doctrine — which acts need approval, how many approvers, which separations of duty — gate-house;
• identity and authentication — key-cape. Identity is imported (OIDC, passkeys, eID, EUDI Wallet, QTSP), never invented here;
• the evidence archive — audit-core. This repository emits and exports; the trail is held there;
• credentials materialized after a decision — secrets-engine;
• notification transport — a memo may be announced by other means; the dialogue stays on the object.

Design Principles

1. One object, many depths. Login and instrument share a schema.
2. Presentation is part of the signed payload. Dynamic linking, not a signature over a file nobody read.
3. Competence before convenience. Routing follows mandate.
4. Return is success.
5. Dialogue stays on the object. Side-channel email is an anti-pattern.
6. Binding level is explicit. Kenntnisnahme ≠ Mitzeichnung ≠ QES.
7. Evidence is an export, not a screenshot.
8. Least privilege of attention. Highlights first, full packet available, no dark patterns — and the UI must make unmistakable that the whole instrument is bound, not only the highlights.
9. Identity is imported.
10. Humans bind, agents draft. An agent may assemble a memo. It may never complete the binding act on the principal's surface.
11. Awareness is not consent. Defaulting a role to last-used is required for situational awareness and forbidden from silently entering view_hash.
12. Informedness without surveillance. Evidence is the hash of the presented view plus explicit highlight acknowledgment — never keystroke analytics, dwell timers, or attention theater.

Layer Placement — Ruled

Layer: Staff. Role: PEP-shaped. Both are ruled.

The shape was ruled by GH-DEC-2026-012 R1 (answering INFD-IN-0001): not an Engine — this repository holds no state another layer reads at runtime for a verdict, and renders no decision. Companion §5 is owed and statute §6.4 applies in full.

The layer value was ruled by GH-DEC-2026-017 §3 (answering INFD-IN-0006) on 2026-09-21. §3's vocabulary is closed and has four tokens — Taxonomy, Tooling, Engine, Staff; comparison is ASCII case-insensitive and nobody is asked to re-spell anything. surface is not among them, and the correct value here is Staff, with role: pep-shaped untouched. ops-mason and ops-warden are the precedent: Staff in the layer column, PEP-shaped in the role column.

This repository had pre-committed to changing both files the same day, without argument, if the vocabulary was ruled closed and a value was named (docs/gate-house-decision-request-layer-vocabulary.md §3). It did. The reasoning that produced surface is not erased — it is kept as history in layer.yaml, because a value written by elimination against a vocabulary that turned out to be closed is evidence about the vocabulary, not carelessness.

Two things follow, and are recorded rather than argued:

• informed-decision was never a §11 non-conformance. §11's obligations attach to estate-authored repositories in §4, and this repository holds no §4 catalog row. GH-DEC-2026-017 §4 states that a run which grades it is over-scoped, and requires every conformance run to state its scope. The correct report is declared voluntarily, outside catalog scope; value not in the vocabulary, correction identified. The correction was this repository's to make and it made it.
• The declaration's form changed too. INTENT.md frontmatter governs; layer.yaml is a derived artifact that must be marked derived, must name INTENT.md as what it derives from, and must agree with it (GH-DEC-2026-017 §1 / A11). A declaration carries no standard version (§5 / A12), so the standard_version: "0.7" this repository flagged is gone. ops-warden owns the reference sidecar form and is updating it; this repository applied the two ruled properties and follows that form for the rest.

One thing the ruling did not settle, carried as INFD-IN-0007 rather than treated as settled: §3.4 says Staff "MUST NOT hold state that another layer depends on at runtime", and this repository's presentation records are exactly state audit-core depends on. The ruling reaches Staff by elimination — not Engine per GH-DEC-2026-012 R1, and nothing else in the four is true — which is the same route this repository walked, and it gives the value. It does not say how a deterministic, non-agentic repository that holds evidentiary state sits inside the layer defined by non-determinism and agentic capability. The value is applied regardless; the question is asked for the next repository in this position, not as a condition on the change.

§4 catalog membership — answered: yes

GH-DEC-2026-017 §4 deliberately did not enrol this repository, because a layer stated about a repository by another is not a declaration and that rule applies to catalogue membership at least as strongly. The question was asked, and this repository's answer is yes: see docs/section-4-catalog-row.md.

The ruling also confirmed that emitting a presentation claim does not require a second catalog row: PEP and PIP are shapes a repository has, and §4 records the layers it occupies. That permission carries three limits, and they are the substance of it rather than caveats on it:

1. The claim carries presentation and nothing else. It must never carry, restate, summarise or imply the decision, the verdict, or whether the act was permitted. A consumer learns from it only what was shown, never what was decided.
2. The claim must not be an input to the decision it presents for. A policy reading view_hash to decide whether an act is permitted would let the presenting surface contribute to its own authorization.
3. The evidence copy reaches audit-core independently of this repository. The claim endpoint and the evidence path are different things and neither substitutes for the other.

Limit 2 is load-bearing. GH-DEC-2026-012 accepted this repository's argument that a renderer attesting its own rendering is not the self-dealing that kept the approval object out of access-engine — but only because that limit holds. Without it, the two collapse into the same failure.

Limit 3 is the one that most shapes the architecture: audit evidence is protected from the actor being audited, and here the actor and the source are the same component.

view_hash and the binding digest

Ruled as option (b): they are distinct attestations with an authority rule.

• approval-engine's binding digest is authoritative for what the request is.
• view_hash is authoritative for what was shown, and nothing else.
• Neither may be substituted for the other.
• A disagreement between them is a finding against the presenting surface, never a fact about the request.

They link by co-reference, not nesting: the presentation record carries the approval or binding identifier explicitly, and both attestations are read against that one reference. This repository must never recompute or restate approval-engine's binding digest in its own vocabulary — it references the digest that layer computed and recorded.

Nesting was refused for a reason worth carrying: it reproduces the hash cycle that made GH-DEC-2026-008 unimplementable, where a claim had to name the digest of a request that would come to contain it, and a fail-closed consumer obeying it would deny permanently.

An inherited gap, stated rather than glossed

GH-DEC-2026-010 requires a decision be attributable to access-engine. No consumer can satisfy that today: the decision envelope is unsigned, a declared §13 gap tracked as FLEX-WP-0024. This repository's record can show that a decision was obtained and what it said; it cannot yet show that access-engine said it. The decision path must not be described as validated while that is open.

What Would Make This Repository Wrong

• It starts deciding. Any surface that answers "may this actor do X" rather than "here is the question, and here is what you were shown" is the failure statute §6 names.
• It becomes an approvals inbox and nothing else. If the object that ships cannot also carry an L0 login banner and an L2 ADR accept, the scale-invariance thesis is dead and the estate bought a queue.
• It forks the schema per level. Three levels, three object models, one broken promise.
• Awareness leaks into the signature. If a last-used role or a tenant orientation hint enters view_hash, the surface signs something the person did not commit to.
• Highlights shrink the legal object. If acking three highlights is presented as binding only those three sections, the UI has produced a lie.
• An agent binds. If any automation can complete a disposition on a principal's behalf, the identity half is fiction.
• It renders approved as permission to act. approved is a state of an object, not authorization. approval-engine actively refuses to serialize a decision. A surface that presents approval status as "you may now do the thing" has re-implemented a PDP in the browser — the same failure as an authorization endpoint, wearing UI copy instead of an API.
• It reimplements approval-engine. Caching approval validity, inferring consumption from a decision record, or holding approval current-state here breaks GH-DEC-2026-003 and the atomicity contract.
• It invents identity. A local password, a local session token that is not derived from key-cape, or a self-issued assurance level.
• Nobody uses it. If approval-engine never receives an approval:approve token from this component's client, the surface is decorative and the gap it claimed to close is still open.

Success Criteria

1. key-cape holds a registered browser client whose client_id and callback URI this repository owns and published, and KEY-WP-0013-T02 is unblocked.
2. A human approver completes an approval entry against approval-engine entirely through this surface, with an access token carrying aud=approval-engine, principal_type: human, and scope approval:approve.
3. The approval entry is reconstructable from a view_hash — the estate can show what the approver was looking at.
4. Required highlights cannot be bypassed: a bind attempt without acks fails.
5. return, discuss, and escalate are exercisable on a real approval and are not modelled as decline.
6. The same schema renders an L0 login banner and an L2 ADR accept, with the binding/awareness split intact and the isolation vectors green.
7. An evidence bundle exports and verifies offline against audit-core's record of the same transitions.
8. No endpoint in this repository answers an authorization question.