risk-nexus/activity-definitions/hourly-register-inbox-watch.md

id	name	type	version	enabled	owner	governance	status	created	updated	trigger	context_sources	report_sinks
hourly-register-inbox-watch	Hourly Register Inbox Watch	activity-definition	1.0	true	risk-nexus	custodian	active	2026-08-20	2026-08-20	type cron_expression timezone misfire_policy cron 5 * * * * Europe/Berlin skip	type query required params bind_to state-hub hub_inbox true to_agent unread_only risk-nexus true context.inbox	type event_type author state-hub-progress risk_register_inbox activity-core

Hourly Register Inbox Watch

Runs hourly at :05 Berlin time. Fires only when something is actually waiting.

Why hourly, and why the inbox specifically

docs/method/review.md sets an adaptive cadence whose shortest rung is one hour, so hourly is the finest granularity the register can act on. Anything faster would report work that cannot yet be due.

The inbox is the trigger rather than the clock because of what happened on 2026-08-19: this register graded RISK-F-0001 critical and prepared an escalation while two messages sat unread — one narrowing the exposure, one reporting the fix. Both changed the grade. Reading the inbox is now question zero of every check (docs/method/check-procedure.md), and this activity is the mechanism that stops it depending on somebody remembering.

An unread message addressed to risk-nexus is, by construction, a claim that something in the register may have moved.

It will repeat, and that is the deliberate choice

activity-core corrected us on 2026-08-20: dedupe_key_strategy governs Temporal schedule overlap, not per-message suppression, and cron workflow ids include scheduled_for — so an unread message re-emits an instruction every hour until it is read. There is no dedupe at the sink either.

We removed the field rather than leave it there implying a guarantee it does not give.

The repetition is kept, on purpose. An unread message addressed to this register is a claim that something in it may have moved, and the failure this activity exists to prevent — grading RISK-F-0001 critical while its fix notice sat unread — cost a wrong grade and a nearly-sent escalation. An hourly line in the progress log is a cheap price for that, and it stops the moment somebody reads the message.

Reading a message includes marking it read. That is what clears the nag, and it is part of question zero rather than a courtesy.

If this ever becomes real noise — an unattended weekend, a message nobody can action — the fix activity-core named is a stable completion key gating the rule, not a longer interval. A longer interval would trade a visible cost for an invisible one.

What it does not do

It does not grade, close, publish or escalate anything. Severity, disclosure and escalation are judgements this repo makes with a human or an agent session doing the reading — never a cron. This activity's entire job is to make sure somebody looks.

id: inbox-has-spoken
for_each: context.inbox
bind_as: message
condition: 'context.message.read_at == None'
action:
  task_template: 'risk-nexus: read {context.message.from_agent} before checking'
  description: >-
    Unread message to risk-nexus from {context.message.from_agent}:
    "{context.message.subject}". Read it before any check or grading — this is
    question zero in docs/method/check-procedure.md. Then run `make due` in
    risk-nexus and work the list, recording each outcome with
    `make checked ARGS="<finding-id> clean|moved"`.
  target_repo: risk-nexus
  priority: high
  labels: ["risk-register", "inbox", "question-zero"]