{"schema_version":1,"research_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_external_evaluation_20260803","source_assessment_id":"representation_independent_interface_contract__religious_studies_theology:P4:v0","cell_id":"representation_independent_interface_contract__religious_studies_theology","search_queries":["site:aiatsis.gov.au code ethics Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander research free prior informed consent Indigenous self determination 2020","site:ethics.gc.ca TCPS 2 Chapter 9 engagement First Nations Inuit Métis community consent research","Local Contexts Traditional Knowledge Labels community authority permissions research data governance official","Mukurtu CMS cultural protocols access permissions official","site:aiatsis.gov.au research ethics code PDF Indigenous informed consent community control withdrawal research","site:americananthro.org ethics statement informed consent dynamic continuous process ethnographic research","ISO 27560 consent record information structure official standard consent receipt","CARE Principles Indigenous Data Governance Data Science Journal 2020 authority control ethics","dynamic consent interface ongoing granular consent withdrawal research participants BMC Medical Ethics 2015 full text","dynamic consent limitations digital divide burden relational consent empirical study research ethics","Indigenous community research consent relational ethics limitations formalization permissions data governance","site:americananthro.org Statement on Ethics Principles of Professional Responsibility informed consent ongoing dynamic process"],"sources":[{"source_id":"S1","title":"AIATSIS Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research","publisher":"Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies","url":"https://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-10/aiatsis-code-ethics.pdf","source_class":"OFFICIAL_GUIDANCE","publication_date":"2020-10","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Indigenous peoples have rights to engagement, self-determination, leadership, and control of culture and heritage in research affecting them.","The code applies to researchers, institutions, funders, review bodies, governance committees, and community organizations.","Consent validity must be maintained throughout a project, may require renegotiation, and withdrawal consequences must be agreed.","Institutional review can coexist with community engagement, collective consent, or Indigenous data-governance arrangements."]},{"source_id":"S2","title":"Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans—Chapter 9: Research Involving the First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples of Canada","publisher":"Government of Canada, Panel on Research Ethics","url":"https://ethics.gc.ca/eng/tcps2-eptc2_2018_chapter9-chapitre9.html","source_class":"GOVERNMENT_OR_REGULATOR","publication_date":"2018","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Researchers working on lands under an Indigenous authority must seek engagement with community leaders subject to stated exceptions.","Institutional research-ethics review and review by a responsible community body are separate requirements.","Collective decision-making and community engagement complement rather than replace individual consent."]},{"source_id":"S3","title":"Conducting Research with Tribal Communities: Sovereignty, Ethics, and Data-Sharing Issues","publisher":"Environmental Health Perspectives; Seattle University Research Repository","url":"https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/faculty/86/","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2012","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Conventional institutional review alone can miss adverse consequences at tribal community or governmental levels.","Only tribal nations themselves can identify certain community-level risks.","The authors recommend agreements that reconcile tribal and university requirements and treat tribes as equal partners in design, collection, interpretation, and publication."]},{"source_id":"S4","title":"Labels: About the Labels","publisher":"Local Contexts","url":"https://localcontexts.org/labels/about-the-labels/","source_class":"OFFICIAL_PRODUCT_DOCUMENTATION","publication_date":"n.d.","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Local Contexts already lets communities express specific conditions for sharing, future research, and relationships in accordance with existing governance.","Permission Labels communicate generally approved activities, while other uses require engagement with primary cultural authorities.","Labels can be customized, translated, and embedded in data infrastructures, and their use requires community decision-making."]},{"source_id":"S5","title":"Understanding Communities and Cultural Protocols","publisher":"Mukurtu CMS, Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation at Washington State University","url":"https://docs.mukurtu.org/communities-cultural-protocols-categories/UnderstandingCommunitiesAndCulturalProtocols/","source_class":"OFFICIAL_PRODUCT_DOCUMENTATION","publication_date":"n.d.","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Mukurtu implements community-scoped, flexible cultural protocols for controlling access to cultural materials.","Protocols can encode seasonal, gender-based, sacred, ceremonial, and committee-review restrictions.","Protocol stewards and other differentiated roles already administer community-specific access rules."]},{"source_id":"S6","title":"ISO/IEC TS 27560:2023—Privacy technologies—Consent record information structure","publisher":"International Organization for Standardization","url":"https://www.iso.org/standard/80392.html","source_class":"STANDARD","publication_date":"2023-08","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["A published technical specification defines an open, extensible information structure for consent records and receipts.","The standard addresses exchange of consent information across systems and lifecycle management.","It concerns individual consent to personal-data processing, not collective community authority over fieldwork."]},{"source_id":"S7","title":"Dynamic Consent: a potential solution to some of the challenges of modern biomedical research","publisher":"BMC Medical Ethics, Springer Nature","url":"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12910-016-0162-9","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2017-01-25","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Dynamic-consent platforms support granular choices, later changes, ongoing communication, tracked histories, and links to other information systems.","Existing implementations demonstrate technical feasibility for electronic consent lifecycle management.","Implementation requires communication and IT skills, maintenance budgets, ethics-review adaptation, security, identity controls, and non-digital alternatives.","Limited empirical evidence, digital exclusion, decision burden, and unmet needs for human interaction constrain inference to community-governed fieldwork."]},{"source_id":"S8","title":"Operationalizing the CARE and FAIR Principles for Indigenous data futures","publisher":"Scientific Data, Springer Nature","url":"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-021-00892-0","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2021-04-16","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Indigenous rights to control and access data remain limited in contemporary data environments.","Operationalization requires provenance, cultural metadata, Indigenous governance, ethics, and engagement across the data lifecycle.","Mukurtu and Traditional Knowledge Labels are existing operational tools, and TK Labels are already used by institutions.","The paper calls for machine-readable decision points but cautions against premature co-option and states that CARE assessment requires engagement with people, not merely technical evaluation."]}],"problem_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"Official guidance and primary research establish that community authorization is distinct from institutional ethics review, must remain valid over time, and may require renegotiation or withdrawal handling. Existing work also documents inadequate community control and the need for machine-readable decision points. However, the specific prevalence of divergent paper and digital permission states in religious-studies fieldwork has not been measured directly.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3","S8"]},"stakeholder_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"The sources identify community governing bodies as decision authorities and identify researchers, ethics bodies, institutions, funders, and data stewards as obligated users. Local Contexts and Mukurtu demonstrate active demand for community-controlled permission and protocol tooling. No named community, religious-studies department, archive, funder, or institution has expressed interest in this particular contract or agreed to authorize a pilot.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S4","S5","S8"]},"prior_art":{"proximity":"ADJACENT_PRIOR_ART","closest_analogues":[{"name":"Local Contexts Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels","similarity":"Community-controlled, customizable provenance, protocol, and permission metadata communicates approved activities and routes other uses to primary cultural authorities.","remaining_difference":"Labels principally communicate conditions attached to knowledge, data, and collections; the source does not establish a project-specific permission state machine with amendments, suspension, revocation, authority-dispute handling, and cross-representation conformance tests.","source_ids":["S4","S8"]},{"name":"Mukurtu CMS cultural protocols","similarity":"Community-scoped protocols, steward roles, flexible restrictions, and culturally appropriate access controls operationalize community authority in software.","remaining_difference":"Mukurtu governs access to digital cultural materials rather than authorization for the broader set of future fieldwork actions, and its documentation does not provide the proposed representation-independent paper-versus-digital permission oracle.","source_ids":["S5","S8"]},{"name":"Dynamic Consent platforms","similarity":"Granular, changeable consent, ongoing communication, histories, receipts, system integration, and lifecycle management closely resemble the proposed operations.","remaining_difference":"The demonstrated domain is individual biomedical-research consent; collective authority, protected deliberation, disputed succession, and community-specific fieldwork governance are not interchangeable with individual participant preferences.","source_ids":["S7"]},{"name":"ISO/IEC TS 27560:2023 consent records and receipts","similarity":"Provides an open, extensible, interoperable structure for consent records, receipts, exchange, and lifecycle management.","remaining_difference":"Its subject is a PII principal's consent to personal-data processing, not a community authority's permission for observation, site access, recording, transformation, publication, or stewardship.","source_ids":["S6"]},{"name":"AIATSIS and TCPS community research-governance practices","similarity":"Already require ongoing consent or engagement, distinguish institutional from community review, and preserve Indigenous decision authority.","remaining_difference":"They are normative governance frameworks rather than a shared executable state-transition contract and conformance suite for substitutable administrative records.","source_ids":["S1","S2"]}],"distinctive_claim_remaining":"Within one community-approved policy and without encoding or exposing its deliberative governance, an authority-scoped, versioned permission state machine plus minimum-disclosure receipts and a shared black-box oracle can make independently structured paper and digital records return substantively equivalent decisions, histories, and errors for proposed fieldwork actions. This is falsifiable by cross-implementation divergence, leakage, unauthorized state transitions, or rejection of the modeled interpretation by the designated authority.","confidence":"HIGH"},"implementation_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"Local Contexts, Mukurtu, Dynamic Consent, and ISO 27560 demonstrate implementable components: community protocols, steward roles, granular permissions, lifecycle records, receipts, and system exchange. A synthetic two-adapter prototype is technically conventional. Evidence does not establish that a community can safely express its relational and contextual governance as a stable public state model, that authority disputes can be represented without institutionalizing the wrong actor, or that conformance tests capture substantive equivalence. Legal effect and records obligations also vary by jurisdiction and cannot be supplied by the interface itself.","source_ids":["S4","S5","S6","S7","S8"]},"scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":4,"rationale":"If valid for a participating community, preventing silent scope broadening, lost conditions, and conflation of community permission with institutional approval could avert serious ethical and cultural harms. Realized impact is unmeasured.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3"]},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":3,"rationale":"Multiple official and first-party sources express demand for ongoing, community-controlled research and data permissions, but there is no committed adopter or pilot authority for this proposal.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S4","S5","S8"]},"incremental_advantage":{"score":2,"rationale":"The combination could add explicit cross-representation testing, authority-dispute states, and minimum-disclosure behavior, but most functional elements already exist separately in Local Contexts, Mukurtu, Dynamic Consent, ISO consent records, and research-governance guidance. No comparative advantage has been demonstrated.","source_ids":["S1","S4","S5","S6","S7"]},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"A community-approved behavioral oracle for paper and digital fieldwork-permission records is a plausible remaining distinction, although it is a recombination of mature adjacent mechanisms rather than evidence of world novelty.","source_ids":["S4","S5","S6","S7","S8"]},"technical_implementability":{"score":4,"rationale":"State machines, append-only histories, scoped queries, receipts, role checks, adapters, and black-box tests are technically feasible, with adjacent deployed systems and a relevant ISO information structure. Semantic correctness remains a human-governance problem.","source_ids":["S4","S5","S6","S7"]},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":2,"rationale":"Official guidance makes clear who must authorize community-specific research governance, but no such body has opted in. Adoption requires compensated co-design, separate ethics review, jurisdictional assessment, succession rules, non-digital operation, and continuing stewardship.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3","S7"]},"evidence_readiness":{"score":2,"rationale":"Web evidence supports the problem and component feasibility, but the distinctive claim requires a community-authored synthetic policy and comparative testing. No candidate-specific prototype, partner decision, test results, or leakage audit exists.","source_ids":["S4","S5","S6","S7","S8"]},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":3,"rationale":"Explicit denial-by-default, immutable histories, minimum disclosure, authority checks, and rollback could improve safety, but formalization may create false legitimacy, burden stewards, or flatten relational judgment. The interface cannot make an invalid authority valid.","source_ids":["S1","S3","S7","S8"]},"scalability":{"score":2,"rationale":"The software pattern and test harness may be reusable, but each permission policy, authority structure, language, disclosure boundary, and legal context must remain community-specific. Cross-community standardization would undermine the proposal's safety premise.","source_ids":["S1","S4","S5","S8"]}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"10K_TO_50K","scope":"A four-to-eight-week compensated co-design and synthetic test sprint with one designated stewardship body: authority mapping, one synthetic policy, 20 predeclared sequences, a paper-ledger model, a minimal independent digital model, divergence adjudication, and a leakage review.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["No live permissions, restricted materials, or confidential deliberations are entered.","The community selects and compensates two to four representatives.","Prototype implementations are deliberately minimal and isolated.","The band includes facilitation, honoraria, research-ethics preparation, software work, and documentation but not production security certification."],"source_ids":["S1","S5","S7","S8"]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"One-community preproduction implementation with a governed contract, independent conformance suite, role and succession model, multilingual and paper fallback, privacy/security design, legal and ethics review, training, and integration with one institutional workflow.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["A successful synthetic study precedes deployment.","Existing identity, document-management, and hosting services can be reused.","No automatic authorization or retrospective reconstruction is permitted.","Community governance and maintenance time are paid project costs."],"source_ids":["S1","S2","S6","S7"]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Production launch for one institution-community partnership or a small multi-project program, including hardened infrastructure, migration verification, independent security and leakage assessment, accessible paper/offline procedures, incident response, audit tooling, user training, and monitored rollout.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["The launch handles sensitive metadata but not protected deliberative records.","Legacy decisions are migrated only after authority validation.","The institution already operates baseline identity, security, backup, and ethics-governance functions.","The estimate excludes large-scale digitization and litigation."],"source_ids":["S1","S5","S6","S7"]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Continuing community stewardship, policy/version review, liaison succession, support, hosting, security updates, annual conformance and leakage audits, training, accessibility, incident response, and compensation for governance participation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["One community profile and a limited portfolio of research projects are supported.","A part-time technical maintainer and paid community governance capacity are retained.","Major policy redesigns, new communities, and extensive records remediation are separate projects."],"source_ids":["S1","S5","S7","S8"]}},"verified_pipeline_gates":{"externally_supported_problem":{"status":"YES","reason":"Official guidance and primary research independently establish that community authorization is distinct from institutional approval, must be governed over time, and can be inadequately represented by conventional research systems.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3","S8"]},"externally_credible_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"Credible authorizer classes and obligated institutional users are externally established, but no named community authority or institution has endorsed this candidate, provided requirements, or agreed to pilot it.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S4","S5"]},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The remaining claim specifies two independent representations, public state-transition behavior, minimum-disclosure outputs, community adjudication, and observable failure conditions beyond the adjacent tools.","source_ids":["S4","S5","S6","S7","S8"]},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"A single opt-in authority, synthetic policy, 20 predeclared sequences, two isolated representations, fixed comparators, and explicit falsifiers form a bounded study without live fieldwork decisions.","source_ids":["S1","S7","S8"]},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The synthetic design avoids live authorization and preserves separate ethics review, but no designated authority has approved the abstraction. Sources warn that community engagement and relational judgment cannot be replaced by technical assessment; rejection of formalization remains a live stop condition.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3","S7","S8"]},"credible_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The scopes identify the required governance, technical, accessibility, security, and maintenance work, but none of the eight sources supplies comparable 2026 prices. The bands are resource-equivalent planning estimates with low confidence.","source_ids":["S1","S5","S6","S7"]}},"next_evidence_step":"After—not before—a named stewardship body opts in and sets compensation and decision authority, run a six-week, non-production study. Have that body co-author one wholly synthetic policy with at least two allowed actions, two prohibited actions, one conditional action, one authority dispute, and explicit amendment, suspension, revocation, expiry, succession, and disclosure rules. Pre-register 20 request/transition sequences and expected public outcomes. Implement them independently in (A) a paper-ledger workflow and (B) a minimal digital state machine. Compare authorization result, scope, state, preserved history, error class, and minimum-disclosure receipt for every sequence; require zero unauthorized transitions, zero scope broadening, complete prior-state retention, and no authority-identified disclosure leak. Representatives—not technical staff—classify every divergence. Falsify the intervention if the authority cannot express the necessary behavior without exposing deliberation or surrendering discretion, if either implementation passes mechanical tests but representatives judge its meaning wrong, if repeated representation-dependent outcomes remain, or if the baseline is already representation-independent. The study does not authorize live research, publication, archiving, or access.","blocking_evidence":["No named community-designated stewardship body has opted in or verified who may authorize the study.","No community-authored synthetic policy or authority/succession model exists.","No comparative paper-versus-digital conformance results or leakage audit exist.","No evidence shows that the proposed public state surface preserves relational and contextual discretion rather than distorting it.","No jurisdiction-specific legal and institutional mapping establishes how the object relates to individual consent, research-ethics approval, records law, intellectual-property rules, site access, and withdrawal consequences.","No direct 2026 cost comparables support the estimated bands.","No realized impact, adoption rate, market size, world novelty, patentability, or freedom-to-operate evidence was measured."],"research_disposition":"PARTNERED_RESEARCH_PROGRAM","world_novelty_boundary":"The search found substantial adjacent policies, standards, products, and research but did not conduct a patent search, exhaustive scholarly review, product census, standards crosswalk, or jurisdictional legal analysis. World novelty, patentability, freedom to operate, market size, and realized impact remain unmeasured. The evaluation supports only a narrow contrastive claim about community-adjudicated behavioral equivalence across record representations.","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_version":0,"controller_recommendation":{"action":"STOP_EMPIRICAL_RESEARCH_NEEDED","repairable":false,"material_progress_observed":true,"progress_targets":["Obtain documented opt-in from one named stewardship body and identify its authorized decision representatives without treating institutional approval as community authorization.","Co-author and pre-register the synthetic policy, comparator fields, acceptance thresholds, leakage criteria, and falsifiers before implementation.","Build independently structured paper and digital adapters and execute all 20 predeclared sequences.","Have designated representatives adjudicate every divergence and explicitly assess whether formalization preserves relational discretion.","Complete a jurisdiction-specific authority, ethics, privacy, records, accessibility, withdrawal, and incident-response crosswalk before any production proposal.","Replace low-confidence planning bands with quotations or observed staff-time data from the bounded study."],"reason":"Bounded web research verifies the underlying governance problem, credible adjacent mechanisms, and a testable residual claim. It cannot establish partner authority, semantic equivalence, acceptability of formalization, leakage safety, workflow burden, or comparative performance. Those questions require compensated community participation and live execution of a synthetic conformance study, so further web research alone cannot clear the pipeline."},"proposal_index":4}