Open Workplace architecture

Status: Candidate architecture for open-workplace/0.2-draft

Open Workplace describes the responsibilities required to keep durable human-agent work legible across sessions, providers and runtimes. It does not prescribe one ontology, filesystem or product architecture.

The Proposal explains Workplace-first. The Protocol turns this architecture into candidate behavior. A Profile maps the responsibilities into one implementation.

Design center

Providers supply execution. A Workplace owns continuity.

A workspace gives an executor somewhere to run. A Workplace gives durable work an identity, owner, provenance and relationship boundary that can survive that execution.

The architecture distinguishes four responsibility holders:

Human               intent, judgment and consent
Workplace           durable context, placement and continuity
Runtime              execution, tools and temporary state
External authority   independent truth, permissions and effects

One product may implement several holders. Their authority must remain recoverable even when they share a filesystem or interface.

First-class properties

An environment may offer useful context without establishing all five. A Profile and valid declaration establish the boundary; visual proximity does not.

Shared semantic primitives

Open Workplace 0.2 has four shared primitives and one derived result.

Source

A Source is content declared authoritative by an identified owner for one responsibility. Canonicality is scoped: the same file need not be authoritative for every claim it contains.

Projection

A Projection is a rebuildable representation of Sources for a consumer. It may reduce, combine or render them, but it does not inherit their authority. Provider instructions, websites, indexes and API payloads are common projections.

Material

Material is addressable content whose owner and durable state can be determined. A Source is Material used authoritatively for a responsibility; not all Material is a Source.

Relationship

A Relationship declares how the Workplace relates to another authority. It may describe access or an address, but does not grant permission or transfer ownership.

Resolved Workplace Context

A Resolved Workplace Context is a derived, objective-bounded view of the relevant Sources, Material, Relationships, owners, authority, provenance, limits and conflicts. It is not itself a new Source.

declared Sources + objective
              ↓
responsibility-specific resolution
              ↓
Resolved Workplace Context
              ↓
small, traceable Projections and bounded action

Why there is no universal object graph

The 0.1 draft made Home, Member, Desk, Room, Meeting, Occupant, Role, Equipment, Site and Route normative. Current evidence comes from one Endroit implementation, so that vocabulary has not earned implementation-neutral status.

In 0.2 those names are Profile vocabulary. An implementation may model teams, projects, threads, repositories, services or other objects instead. It remains compatible with the draft’s intent when it preserves the shared responsibilities and reports what it cannot represent.

Material remains a shared term because the protocol must distinguish addressable durable content from projections and temporary execution output.

Authority invariants

1. Human intent, judgment and consent are not inferred from generated output.
2. Every authoritative claim has an owner and provenance.
3. Source authority is scoped to a responsibility.
4. A Projection never replaces its Sources merely because it is easier to consume.
5. Runtime memory and transcripts are evidence, not durable truth by default.
6. Physical containment does not transfer ownership.
7. Access to an external authority does not grant permission to mutate it.
8. External effects become facts only when observed at the external authority.
9. Incompatible claims to one responsibility remain visible as ambiguity.
10. Missing optional tooling is a limit, not permission to reconstruct truth.

Independent semantic axes

The architecture does not define one universal lifecycle. Implementations must keep these questions independently answerable when they apply:

An implementation may use its own states. It must not collapse these axes into final: true or a linear sequence that implies authority it did not receive.

Three planes

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Execution                                               │
│ provider · runtime · tools · temporary state            │
└──────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────┘
                           │ reads projections / proposes effects
┌──────────────────────────▼──────────────────────────────┐
│ Workplace                                               │
│ Sources · Material · resolution · Relationships         │
└──────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────┘
                           │ bounded access
┌──────────────────────────▼──────────────────────────────┐
│ External authority                                      │
│ independent truth · history · permissions · effects     │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The planes are authority distinctions, not deployment tiers. A single Git repository may physically contain evidence from all three.

Resolution model

Resolution begins from a Profile-declared boundary and a current objective. It identifies only the relevant responsibilities, Sources and Relationships.

candidate boundary
       ↓ validate declaration and Profile
declared Workplace
       ↓ resolve owners, Sources and conflicts
objective-bounded context
       ↓ classify missing capabilities or authority
candidate | resolved | degraded | ambiguous

degraded means static authority remains readable while optional machinery is missing. ambiguous means a required owner, Source or destination cannot be chosen safely. A system can be degraded and still useful; it cannot guess its way out of ambiguity.

Source and projection topology

owner ─declares→ Source ─contributes→ Resolved Workplace Context
                         └─derives→ Projection ─serves→ consumer

Workplace ─declares→ Relationship ─reaches→ external authority
human authority + host permission ─authorize→ attempted effect
external observation ─establishes→ observed effect

The topology requires recoverable provenance, not a graph database. A static Markdown declaration and a deterministic resolver can satisfy it.

Context reduction

Resolution should produce the smallest owned context that supports the current objective. Loading every durable domain, relationship or capability is not a safe default: it increases noise and can mix unrelated authorities.

Reduction may use indexes, search or summaries, provided the consumer can recover whether it received a Source or Projection and where the owning Source lives.

Limits

Open Workplace does not define:

• an agent memory architecture;
• durable agent identity or roles;
• a task or workflow engine;
• a universal document schema;
• a filesystem layout;
• a permission system;
• concurrent write isolation;
• a Profile registry or conversion API;
• certification or conformance.

The architecture is deliberately smaller than Endroit. Endroit can prove or disprove these responsibilities through one concrete Profile, but cannot make its own nouns universal without independent evidence.

Evolution

open-workplace/0.2-draft supersedes and is incompatible with 0.1. The older draft remains historical evidence in Git. This draft should expand only when another implementation demonstrates a missing shared responsibility or when repeated use exposes an ambiguity in these invariants.