Field Guide · Glossary
Five nouns, no more.
The whole Field Guide is built from these. If a page introduces a sixth, the page is wrong — not the glossary.
- Receipt
- A signed record of one independently governable unit of execution.
- Inputs, policy fingerprint, verdicts, timestamp, signature. A new receipt appears when authority changes hands — not once per message.
- Authority
- The party on whose behalf an agent acted.
- Identity plus scope plus expiry. Answers the question "who allowed this?" without pointing at a model.
- Evidence
- What you show when your word is not enough.
- A bundle a third party can verify on their own machine, without access to your systems.
- Policy
- A rule an agent will actually follow at run time.
- Compiled into a versioned bundle with a stable fingerprint; loaded before the decision is made.
- Identity
- Who — or what — is on the other end of the request.
- For non-human callers, this is closer to a workload than a user. Scoped, revocable, auditable.
How the five combine
No sixth noun — these are the shapes the five take when a business action is governed end to end.
- Decision
- The smallest business action worth governing on its own — issue the refund, deploy the release. It names the action, declares the inputs it depends on, and carries a permanent identifier: renaming it would orphan every receipt that cites it, so decisions are retired, never renamed.
- Participant
- A party whose answer the decision depends on — a policy, an external system that owns a business rule, or a human approver. Participants are declared, never inferred. If a required one does not answer, the runtime records that fact rather than guessing.
- Verdict
- The one outcome composed from every participant's answer, valid only inside a bounded execution window. It becomes evidence on the receipt, alongside what each participant said and when.
The long version lives in Decision governance.