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Actors

Definition

The third layer of the PAAA governance model (ADR-0143): who or what is authorized to act on a repository, and with what delegated authority. It answers "who may change what?". The agents/ tree — role contracts and chamber charters — is the Actors declaration per the 2026-08-25 house standard (#11741); a governing declaration may point at that directory but must never re-declare roles in YAML. Adjacent surfaces bound what an authorized actor may do rather than naming who it is: WorkerRole fixes the closed set of roles a director may request, RepoRecord.data_class fixes the data-governance class enforced at every model spawn, and the merge-policy autonomy classes (act / ask) fix where an agent may proceed alone and where it must ask.

Invariants

  • Actors are declared by the agents/ directory layout; a manifest may point at it and must not restate roles — two declarations of who may act is one too many.
  • A role outside the declared vocabulary cannot be invented at runtime; unknown authority values fail closed.
  • Delegated authority is bounded: an actor classified ask cannot self-promote to act.