{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_four_proposal_generalization60_20260803","cell_id":"representation_independent_interface_contract__religious_studies_theology","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"ric-community-stewardship-permission-004","proposal_index":4,"version":0,"title":"Community Stewardship Permission Contract for Religious-Studies Fieldwork","problem":"A religious-studies project may receive permission to observe a ceremony, enter a site, record an account, retain community-governed material, or publish a derivative through a letter, meeting, liaison, spreadsheet, or institutional portal. Researchers and administrators can mistake those artifacts or workflows for the permission itself. When a community changes its liaison, deliberative process, record system, or conditions, the project may be unable to determine whether permission is pending, granted, conditional, suspended, revoked, expired, or inapplicable to a new use. Institutional ethics approval, physical access, and community permission may also be treated as interchangeable even though each answers a different question.","actors":["Community-designated councils, custodians, elders, cultural authorities, or stewardship bodies","Community liaisons authorized to communicate decisions","Religious-studies researchers and field teams requesting permission","Archive, publication, or project staff checking whether a proposed action is permitted","Institutional ethics and research-integrity officers with separate oversight roles","Technical administrators maintaining permission records without authority to grant permission"],"observable_state":"Two authorized record systems representing the same stewardship decision return different answers about whether a researcher may perform a proposed action. A paper record may show a general grant while a portal omits an oral condition; one system may treat silence or a missing record as denial while another treats it as approval; an amendment may overwrite the original scope; a revocation may remove the audit trail; or a query may expose internal deliberations and identities not intended for researchers. Users cannot distinguish an implementation defect from a genuine change in community authorization.","consequence":"Researchers may undertake an action outside the communicated permission, refrain from an authorized action because the state is unclear, or rely on a superseded contact or document. Community stewards may have to restate decisions after administrative changes, while technical migration can inadvertently broaden, narrow, erase, or disclose the conditions they set.","affected_objective":"Preserve community-defined scope, authority, conditions, and change history for research permissions while allowing the administrative workflow and record representation to change without transferring decision authority to researchers or technical systems.","intervention":"Define an opaque, versioned Community Stewardship Permission object whose meaning is determined by public operations and invariants rather than by a form, database, or deliberative procedure. Its operations request a decision, record an authorized decision, query whether a precisely described action is within scope, request an amendment, acknowledge a condition, suspend or revoke permission, record expiry, and retrieve a minimum-disclosure receipt. Model states such as unsubmitted, pending, granted, conditional, denied, suspended, revoked, expired, and authority-disputed. Every permission must carry the authorizing body, authorized communicator, project and actor scope, governed material or site, permitted actions and transformations, audience, duration, conditions, contract version, and provenance of state changes. Internal deliberations, voting rules, kinship or office structures, meeting records, languages, paper layouts, and storage schemas remain hidden unless the community deliberately exposes them. A paper-ledger adapter and a digital implementation may be treated as substitutes only if both pass the same black-box state-transition and disclosure tests under a policy approved by the relevant community authority.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Abstract behavioral surface","domain_realization":"Authorized operations request, grant, deny, query, amend, acknowledge conditions, suspend, revoke, expire, and retrieve a minimum-disclosure receipt for a community stewardship permission."},{"archetype_element":"Hidden representation","domain_realization":"Council deliberations, voting or consensus procedures, internal roles, meeting notes, paper forms, database tables, identifiers, translations, and notification workflow remain non-contractual."},{"archetype_element":"Abstract state and transitions","domain_realization":"A permission moves through explicit states such as pending, conditional, granted, denied, suspended, revoked, expired, or authority-disputed only through operations performed by actors authorized for that transition."},{"archetype_element":"Behavioral laws and invariants","domain_realization":"Silence and technical failure never create a grant; queries do not mutate permission; amendments preserve prior states; scope never broadens through copying or migration; institutional approval and physical access do not imply community permission; every decision remains attached to its issuing authority and version."},{"archetype_element":"Error and side-effect semantics","domain_realization":"Unknown authority, incomplete action descriptions, unsupported retrospective requests, and conflicting instructions return distinct review-required results without changing the existing permission."},{"archetype_element":"Conformance oracle","domain_realization":"Community-approved synthetic scenarios and generated operation sequences test state, scope, authority, history, error, and minimum-disclosure behavior without inspecting internal governance or storage."},{"archetype_element":"Substitutability rule","domain_realization":"Two administrative implementations are substitutable only within the same community-approved policy scope and only if their observable permission behavior conforms; one community or authority is never treated as a substitute for another."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"abstract_data_type_specification","role":"Defines permission as an authority-scoped abstract state with operations, invariants, and a mapping from valid paper or digital records to that state, independent of the record’s layout or the community’s internal deliberative procedure.","counterfactual_removal":"Without an abstract value and representation mapping, a signed form, portal status, or meeting note can be mistaken for the permission itself, and migration equivalence cannot be assessed."},{"mechanism_slug":"design_by_contract_clause","role":"Specifies preconditions and postconditions for each request, grant, amendment, query, suspension, revocation, and expiry operation, including who may invoke it, what changes, what remains unchanged, and which review-required error is returned.","counterfactual_removal":"Without operation-level clauses, implementations can differ silently about incomplete requests, unauthorized actors, retroactive changes, conflicts, or the meaning of a missing record."},{"mechanism_slug":"opaque_type_or_module_boundary","role":"Exposes only a permission handle, scoped queries, authorized transitions, and minimum-disclosure receipts while withholding internal deliberations, identities, governance structures, notes, and mutable storage fields.","counterfactual_removal":"Without opacity, researchers or administrators may couple their behavior to internal contacts, votes, notes, or database fields and may gain access to information the community did not authorize for disclosure."},{"mechanism_slug":"black_box_contract_test_suite","role":"Runs the same community-approved synthetic requests, transitions, queries, conflicts, and disclosure checks against paper-ledger and digital implementations using only their public operations.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a common black-box oracle, both systems may claim to represent the same policy while producing different authorization or privacy outcomes."},{"mechanism_slug":"property_based_conformance_test","role":"Generates sequences involving amendments, acknowledgments, suspension, attempted unauthorized transitions, revocation, expiry, and migration to verify that scope, authority, history, and disclosure invariants survive every path.","counterfactual_removal":"Without generated transition testing, example cases may miss paths that broaden scope, erase a condition, revive a revoked permission, or lose the issuing authority."},{"mechanism_slug":"representation_leakage_probe","role":"Audits receipts, status codes, timing, ordering, identifiers, notifications, and error messages for clues that expose internal deliberations, membership, disagreement, or workflow details not included in the public contract.","counterfactual_removal":"Without leakage review, a technically opaque permission object may still reveal sensitive governance information through observable but unpromised behavior."},{"mechanism_slug":"semantic_versioning_and_deprecation_gate","role":"Records reviewed changes to permission vocabulary, query semantics, disclosure policy, and transition rules while retaining the version governing each decision and prohibiting silent reinterpretation.","counterfactual_removal":"Without version governance, an administrative update could change what an existing grant or condition appears to authorize without a new community decision."}],"causal_chain":["Researchers currently encounter permission through forms, conversations, contacts, and administrative systems whose representation is easily confused with the underlying community decision.","The contract separates an authority-scoped permission state from the deliberative process and record representation that produce and store it.","Explicit operations, invariants, errors, and transition authority prevent silence, missing data, migration, or unauthorized edits from creating or broadening a grant.","Opaque access and leakage review limit researchers and administrators to the decision information the community has chosen to communicate.","Paper and digital implementations face the same community-approved black-box scenarios and generated transition sequences.","Divergences are returned to the designated authority as implementation defects, contract underspecification, authority disputes, or new decisions rather than being resolved by technical staff.","A conforming administrative implementation can replace another without changing permission scope or exposing internal governance, while substantive authority remains with the community-designated body."],"baseline":"With the explicit approval of one designated stewardship body, model a fictional or fully synthetic research request and document how the current administrative process would represent request, conditional grant, amendment, query, suspension, revocation, expiry, and authority dispute. Record which answers depend on form wording, personal knowledge, document location, database fields, notification order, or unstated assumptions. Do not inspect confidential deliberations, evaluate any live project, or convert historical communications into permissions.","nearest_rivals":["Use a signed one-time consent or access form as the complete permission record.","Treat institutional ethics approval or site access as a proxy for community authorization.","Maintain a prose memorandum of understanding without executable state, query, error, or transition semantics.","Route every question through one liaison without preserving versioned scope or authorized succession.","Adopt a universal permission template across communities and governance systems.","Implement a technical access-control list that can allow or block files but cannot represent purpose, audience, transformation, conditions, or authority disputes."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The proposal does not standardize community governance, automate consent, or make different authorities interchangeable. Its distinctive claim is that the externally communicated permission state can have a precise, testable behavioral contract while the community’s internal deliberation and administrative representation remain private and replaceable. Substitution applies only to authorized record implementations under one governing policy, never to the authority itself.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"Only the community-designated body or person acting within explicitly delegated scope may grant, condition, amend, suspend, revoke, or interpret community permission. Institutional ethics bodies retain their separate authority, and researchers remain responsible for satisfying all applicable obligations. Technical staff may implement and test the interface but may not infer, create, or resolve permission.","authorized_first_step":"Ask a designated stewardship representative whether they wish to co-author a synthetic, non-production permission policy and test fixtures. If they agree, model fictional requests in an isolated paper-ledger adapter and minimal digital implementation without entering live decisions or community-governed materials.","excluded_actions":["Treating the contract or a technical status as a substitute for legally or institutionally required consent and ethics review","Inferring permission from silence, prior access, relationship, payment, institutional approval, or technical availability","Reconstructing historical permission where the authorized body has not confirmed it","Transferring one community’s profile, authority, or decision to another community","Publishing internal deliberations, identities, disagreements, sacred information, or restricted governance records","Allowing automated systems or technical administrators to grant or broaden permission","Applying pilot outputs to live fieldwork, publication, archiving, or access decisions","Promising retroactive deletion or withdrawal effects that the designated authority and data custodians have not confirmed as feasible"],"halt_rollback":"Stop if the designated authority withdraws participation, authority is disputed, a fixture exposes restricted information, a state broadens without an authorized transition, the interface conflates institutional approval with community permission, or minimum-disclosure outputs reveal internal governance. Disconnect the pilot, invalidate all synthetic handles, remove access to copied fixtures, preserve current records unchanged, and return unresolved questions to the designated authorities."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"Community stewards determine that formalizing the public surface itself distorts an intentionally relational or context-dependent governance practice, shifts interpretive power toward institutions, or exposes distinctions that should not be made legible to researchers. Additional counterevidence would be implementations that pass every test while the designated authority rejects the resulting permission interpretation.","problem_falsifier":"The approved baseline shows that existing permission behavior is already explicit, authority-scoped, versioned, privacy-preserving, representation-independent, and invariant across administrative migrations, with no reliance on forms, personal contacts, storage fields, or unstated transition assumptions.","intervention_falsifier":"The designated authority cannot express necessary permission behavior through a stable public state and operation surface without revealing protected deliberation or surrendering indispensable discretion, or two conforming implementations repeatedly produce outcomes the authority regards as substantively different.","risks":["Formalization may convert a relationship of continuing accountability into a transactional status check.","Institutions may present the interface as evidence of legitimacy beyond its declared scope.","Authority may be contested, distributed, temporary, or inappropriate to reduce to one field.","A contract may freeze a governance arrangement that the community expects to remain adaptable.","Minimum-disclosure receipts may still reveal sensitive projects, sites, materials, or community structures.","Researchers may assume a grant covers unlisted transformations, audiences, collaborators, or future uses.","Revocation may be technically recorded while copies or publications remain beyond practical recall.","Test designers may encode institutional assumptions about decision, identity, or time that do not fit the governing community."]},"next_evidence_step":"If a designated stewardship body opts in, have it approve one synthetic policy containing at least two permitted actions, two prohibited actions, one conditional action, one authority dispute, and explicit suspension, revocation, expiry, and disclosure rules. Predeclare 20 request-and-transition sequences, then run them against an isolated paper-ledger model and an independently structured digital model. Compare only public decisions, histories, errors, and receipts; conduct a leakage audit; and ask the designated representatives to classify each divergence. The evidence is limited to whether the contract preserves their synthetic policy across representations, not whether it is appropriate for deployment or for another community.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Compared with proposal 1, this proposal governs authorization for future research actions rather than the representation and querying of completed ritual evidence. Its abstract object is a revocable, authority-scoped permission with guarded transitions and minimum disclosure, not a source-linked archival record with emic/etic and provenance-preservation laws. Compared with proposal 2, it preserves community decisions through administrative-system changes rather than calculating observance dates through interchangeable calendrical engines; its causal path depends on authorized state mutation, revocation, and privacy rather than deterministic temporal resolution. Compared with proposal 3, it protects community stewardship authority rather than assessing a learner’s readiness; permission cannot be earned through demonstrated capability, and its implementations are record-and-query systems rather than transcript, portfolio, or challenge-assessment routes. This proposal can be adopted for fieldwork governance without an archival evidence repository, observance resolver, or educational attestation, and none of those earlier interventions constitutes a component of it.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":[],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}