{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_four_proposal_generalization60_20260803","cell_id":"representation_independent_interface_contract__sociology_anthropology","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"federated_mutual_aid_commitment_contract","proposal_index":3,"version":0,"title":"Behavioral Commitment Contract for Federated Mutual-Aid Referrals","problem":"A neighborhood mutual-aid federation routes bounded requests such as grocery delivery, transportation, translation, or temporary equipment among autonomous member groups. Each group coordinates work through its own combination of chat channels, spreadsheets, phone trees, volunteer rosters, and local status terms. Federation dispatchers therefore determine whether help has been accepted, started, blocked, released, or completed by inspecting group-specific artifacts and contacting particular coordinators. When a group changes tools, personnel, or internal workflow, the federation can misread a status, send duplicate teams, leave a request apparently assigned after it has been released, or expose internal volunteer information merely to learn whether anyone has made a commitment.","actors":["Residents or community members requesting assistance","Federation dispatch coordinators","Autonomous mutual-aid member groups","Group schedulers and volunteer coordinators","Volunteers or service teams fulfilling accepted requests","Federation interface stewards"],"observable_state":"For each bounded request, dispatchers can observe whether it is offered, acknowledged, committed, in progress, blocked, completed, released, withdrawn, or expired. Representation coupling is visible when two dispatchers infer different states from the same group record, duplicate messages create multiple assignments, a released commitment remains active in the federation, or a dispatcher must inspect private rosters, chat histories, spreadsheet colors, or group-specific labels to determine the public commitment state.","consequence":"A representation-dependent handoff can produce duplicate or missed visits, ambiguous responsibility, unnecessary disclosure of requester or volunteer information, and emergency escalation based on stale status. It also makes autonomous groups retain tools and conventions that federation clients have learned to depend on, even when the groups want to reorganize internally.","affected_objective":"Coordinate time-bounded aid commitments reliably across autonomous groups while preserving each group's control over its internal organizing process, personnel records, and choice of coordination tools.","intervention":"Define an opaque Aid Commitment object for each request-provider pairing. Its public operations are offer_request, acknowledge, accept_commitment, decline, begin_work, report_blocked, release_commitment, complete, withdraw_request, expire, and query_status. The public surface exposes only a request reference, bounded service category, coarse service area, relevant time window, commitment role, current state, public conditions, and stable transition references. The contract specifies preconditions, postconditions, allowed transitions, error classes, notifications, and side-effect limits independently of any member group's internal workflow. Its laws require that only the provider group can accept or release its commitment; requester withdrawal prevents new work from beginning; duplicate operations with the same transition reference are idempotent; invalid transitions leave state unchanged; queries do not mutate state; completion requires a previously active commitment; release cannot masquerade as completion; every accepted transition remains auditable; and public outputs never expose volunteer rosters or internal deliberation. A group-approved adapter maps its valid local records to the abstract commitment state. The federation accepts a new or replacement adapter only after it passes the same synthetic black-box transition suite. Conformance establishes compatible coordination behavior, not provider capacity, service quality, trustworthiness, or an obligation to accept work.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Abstract component","domain_realization":"The externally observable commitment made by one autonomous mutual-aid group concerning one bounded assistance request."},{"archetype_element":"Observable operation surface","domain_realization":"Offer, acknowledge, accept, decline, begin, block, release, complete, withdraw, expire, and query through stable public operations."},{"archetype_element":"Abstract state model","domain_realization":"Offered, acknowledged, committed, in progress, blocked, completed, released, declined, withdrawn, or expired, with contractually allowed transitions."},{"archetype_element":"Behavioral laws and invariants","domain_realization":"Transitions are authority-scoped and auditable; duplicate messages are idempotent; invalid operations preserve state; withdrawal blocks new work; release and completion remain distinct."},{"archetype_element":"Hidden representation","domain_realization":"Volunteer rosters, chat messages, spreadsheet layouts, phone-tree structure, internal task labels, scheduling algorithms, and local deliberation remain non-contractual."},{"archetype_element":"Abstraction function","domain_realization":"Each group-approved adapter maps a valid local coordination state to exactly one public commitment state plus its enforceable public conditions."},{"archetype_element":"Conformance oracle","domain_realization":"One synthetic black-box suite applies request and transition sequences to every adapter and observes only public results, errors, notifications, and state changes."},{"archetype_element":"Substitutability rule","domain_realization":"A group may replace its internal tool or federation adapter when the replacement preserves the public commitment behavior; passing does not make different provider groups socially interchangeable."},{"archetype_element":"Leakage control","domain_realization":"An audit checks public identifiers, error wording, notification timing, ordering, and metadata for exposure of internal capacity, membership, or deliberation."},{"archetype_element":"Versioned stewardship","domain_realization":"Changes to public commitment meaning require federation-and-member review, while conforming changes to a group's private implementation remain under that group's control."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"abstract_data_type_specification","role":"Models an aid commitment as an abstract state and operation sequence, then requires every local adapter to maintain a valid representation and map it to that meaning.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the abstract state, invariant, and mapping, the federation would merely translate local labels and could not verify that a tool change preserved commitment semantics."},{"mechanism_slug":"design_by_contract_clause","role":"Defines who may invoke each transition, its required inputs, promised result, notification side effects, and failure behavior.","counterfactual_removal":"Without operation-level clauses, adapters could disagree about duplicate acceptance, withdrawal, release, completion, or invalid transitions while appearing to share an interface."},{"mechanism_slug":"interface_definition_language","role":"Publishes a machine-readable minimal surface from which federation and member-group adapter boundaries can be generated.","counterfactual_removal":"Without an enforceable boundary schema, dispatch clients could continue importing group-specific status fields and internal identifiers."},{"mechanism_slug":"opaque_type_or_module_boundary","role":"Makes rosters, conversations, internal task objects, and scheduling representations unreachable through routine federation operations.","counterfactual_removal":"Without opacity, dispatchers could bypass the contract to resolve uncertainty, causing private internals to become load-bearing coordination dependencies."},{"mechanism_slug":"black_box_contract_test_suite","role":"Runs the same synthetic request histories against every adapter and gates technical acceptance on public behavior alone.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a shared oracle, replacements could diverge on rare but consequential sequences such as withdrawal during blockage or duplicated completion messages."},{"mechanism_slug":"property_based_conformance_test","role":"Generates transition sequences, retries, and message reorderings to test invariants, idempotency, and equivalent outcomes across implementations.","counterfactual_removal":"Without generated sequences, hand-written cases may omit combinations that leave commitments stuck, duplicated, or incorrectly terminal."},{"mechanism_slug":"representation_leakage_probe","role":"Searches observable outputs and side channels for unpromised disclosure of volunteer identities, group capacity, internal priority, or tool-specific structure.","counterfactual_removal":"Without leakage testing, formally private coordination details could remain observable and become unofficial federation inputs."},{"mechanism_slug":"semantic_versioning_and_deprecation_gate","role":"Classifies changes to public transition meaning and provides a migration period before an operation, state, or error behavior is removed.","counterfactual_removal":"Without version governance, a nominal adapter update could change federation-visible commitment behavior without giving member groups or dispatchers a migration path."}],"causal_chain":["Federation dispatchers interact with member groups only through the public Aid Commitment operations.","Each group maps its private coordination process to a small abstract state machine without exposing the roster, tool, or deliberation that realizes it.","Authority-scoped transitions prevent the federation from accepting work for a group or turning release into completion.","Idempotency and state invariants make retries and reordered messages resolve according to declared behavior rather than local implementation quirks.","A common black-box oracle rejects adapters that produce different public outcomes for the same synthetic histories.","Leakage probes identify public artifacts that would let dispatchers reconstruct or depend on private coordination details.","A conforming group can then change its internal tools or adapter while preserving the commitment behavior on which federation routing relies."],"baseline":"Federation dispatchers consult each group's preferred chat, spreadsheet, phone contact, or task board and translate local status conventions manually. Point-to-point scripts and personal knowledge bridge some differences, but there is no shared state-transition contract or implementation-independent acceptance test. Tool or personnel changes therefore require coordination across the federation.","nearest_rivals":["Require every member group to adopt one federation-owned case-management platform.","Keep autonomous tools but employ a central dispatcher to call each group's designated coordinator for every status change.","Build permanent point-to-point integrations that translate each group's current fields into the federation database.","Centralize volunteer scheduling and assignment under a federation command structure."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"Unlike a common platform, the intervention does not standardize member groups' internal organizing representation. Unlike permanent telephone mediation, it makes public transition obligations explicit and repeatable. Unlike field-level integrations, it governs sequences, authority, errors, retries, and side effects rather than status syntax alone. Unlike centralized assignment, it leaves acceptance and release authority with each group. The conditional structural claim is that conforming implementations can change without federation clients depending on their private representation; it does not claim that autonomous groups or their services are interchangeable.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"Each member group retains authority over its capacity, internal prioritization, personnel, and whether it accepts or releases a commitment. The requester retains authority to withdraw the request. The federation steward may define and test the shared technical contract with member approval but may not assign a group, infer availability, compel acceptance, or convert technical conformance into a service obligation.","authorized_first_step":"Member-authorized representatives may conduct a tabletop using fictional requests, fictional volunteers, and prototype adapters to determine whether the abstract states and transition rules express their coordination commitments. No live request is routed or changed.","excluded_actions":["Automatically assigning a request from inferred group capacity","Treating an acknowledgment as an accepted commitment","Exposing requester identity or precise location before an authorized workflow requires it","Exposing volunteer identities, rosters, internal priorities, or deliberative messages","Ranking or sanctioning groups based solely on interface status histories","Using conformance as evidence of service quality, safety, or provider trustworthiness","Testing the initial contract on an unmet live request","Replacing a group's adapter without that group's authorization","Designing transitions that prevent a requester from withdrawing"],"halt_rollback":"Stop if a member group or requester representative finds that the state model converts voluntary coordination into assignment, exposes protected information, or erases a necessary negotiation state. Discard the prototypes, retain existing communication channels, and return disputed states or operations to member governance. Any later pilot must permit immediate routing back to the prior manual process."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"The strongest counterevidence would show that coordination failures arise from insufficient capacity, unsafe or ambiguous requests, geographic mismatch, or lack of trust while status translation remains accurate across tool and personnel changes. A behavioral interface would not resolve those substantive constraints.","problem_falsifier":"For the examined federation, the problem is falsified if independent dispatchers can reconstruct identical commitment states and transition histories after materially different group-tool changes without inspecting private records, relying on particular coordinators, or applying undocumented translation conventions.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is falsified if independently implemented adapters pass the stated oracle yet produce different public outcomes on held-out transition sequences; if ordinary routing still requires federation access to hidden group state; or if member-authorized reviewers cannot map legitimate coordination states without converting voluntary negotiation into a false commitment.","risks":["The contract may make relational, negotiated aid appear more fungible and transactional than participants consider appropriate.","Standardized status histories could enable surveillance, ranking, or pressure on volunteer groups.","A coarse public state may conceal safety concerns that require authorized human communication.","The state model may erase collective or multi-provider forms of commitment.","Request metadata, identifiers, error patterns, or timing may expose sensitive needs or group capacity.","A weak conformance suite may certify adapters that mishandle rare transition sequences.","The federation interface may become a central dependency even while member tools remain decentralized.","Contract maintenance may impose administrative work on groups with limited coordination capacity."]},"next_evidence_step":"Run one two-week, non-live tabletop with representatives authorized by three member groups, one requester advocate, and one federation dispatcher. Before prototyping, define the public states, authority matrix, notification side effects, protected observables, and stop conditions. Create 16 fictional histories covering acceptance, decline, withdrawal before and after acceptance, duplicate messages, reordered messages, blockage, release, expiry, shared-provider roles, invalid completion, adapter restart, notification failure, and contract-version mismatch. Implement one spreadsheet-backed adapter and one chat-task-backed adapter independently, then run the same example and generated black-box tests through a fictional federation router. Record divergent public outcomes, unmappable local states, requests to inspect hidden data, and leakage through identifiers, errors, metadata, or timing. Do not route live aid or interpret passing results as evidence about provider performance.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Proposal 1 concerns normative authorization to use archived ethnographic materials: its abstract object is a community permission decision, and its causal path prevents internal governance representation from controlling archive access. Proposal 2 concerns epistemic continuity in fieldwork data: its abstract object is a corpus of attributed kin-relation claims, and its causal path preserves uncertainty, provenance, supersession, and analytical derivations across storage backends. This proposal concerns operational coordination among autonomous mutual-aid groups: its abstract object is a voluntary service commitment, and its causal path uses authority-scoped transitions, retry laws, conformance testing, and hidden internal coordination to keep cross-group routing stable. It neither decides access to research materials nor represents kinship knowledge. It is independently adoptable by a mutual-aid federation with no ethnographic archive or kin-relation corpus.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Third complete proposal","Materially different problem and intervention","Distinct operational causal chain","Explicit diversity from proposals 1 and 2","Authority-bounded first evidence"],"conceptual_changes":["Initial formulation of a voluntary aid commitment as a representation-independent behavioral object.","Separated implementation substitutability from any claim that provider groups or services are socially interchangeable."],"operational_changes":["Specified commitment operations, states, authority rules, idempotency, side effects, conformance gate, leakage review, rollback, and synthetic tabletop."],"evidence_changes":["Kept prior art unsearched and limited initial evidence to fictional requests and non-live adapters."],"claim_changes":["Restricted the claim to conditional preservation of federation-visible commitment behavior and made no claim of novelty, prevalence, demand, or effect size."]}}