{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_four_proposal_generalization60_20260803","cell_id":"ritualized_meaning_and_commitment_enactment__environmental_climate","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"rmce-envclim-scenario-sunset-assembly-02","proposal_index":2,"version":0,"title":"Scenario Sunset Assembly for Retiring Climate-Projection Packages","problem":"A regional climate-scenario program has technically deprecated a gridded projection package, but the package remains socially legitimate because it anchors published analyses, familiar workflows, and the professional contributions of its creators. A catalog warning alone does not establish a collectively recognized ending, preserve the reasons for the change, identify downstream dependencies, or transfer continuing obligations to a successor package. Users therefore face an ambiguous boundary between reproducibility use, historical reference, and prohibited use in new decisions.","actors":["Climate-model and downscaling scientists","Scenario-catalog and data-provenance custodians","Authors and maintainers of the retiring projection package","Authors and maintainers of the successor package","Climate-service analysts and planners who use the projections","Independent methods and uncertainty reviewers","Program governance board with catalog authority","Known downstream users unable or unwilling to attend"],"observable_state":"A package marked deprecated remains selectable for new analyses; documentation does not consistently distinguish reproduction of prior work from new decision use; downstream products lack migration owners; users cannot readily explain why retirement occurred or which successor preserves which capabilities; and original maintainers continue receiving informal requests because custody has not been visibly transferred.","consequence":"New analyses may continue from assumptions or methods the program no longer endorses, while prior results become difficult to reproduce if retirement is handled by silent deletion. Ambiguous custody can also leave migration questions, uncertainty disclosures, and user notifications without accountable owners.","affected_objective":"Maintain an interpretable, reproducible, and governable climate-scenario catalog in which retired projection packages have clear use boundaries, preserved provenance, identified successors, and assigned residual obligations.","intervention":"After an ordinary technical review has recommended retirement, convene a voluntary quarterly Scenario Sunset Assembly for each affected projection package. A neutral catalog-status tone marks the beginning. A facilitator traces the package's lineage from its original purpose through known revisions and successor products without presenting its history as inevitable or flawless. Consenting authors and users may offer brief witnessed accounts of what the package enabled, where it failed, and which dependencies remain; written, anonymous, remote, silent, and nonparticipating paths are available. A bounded silence interval acknowledges unresolved uncertainty without implying agreement. The governance secretary then reads the proposed boundary between historical reproduction and new use. Custodians may accept, revise, transfer, or decline specific migration and preservation obligations. If the authorized board subsequently confirms retirement, closure changes the versioned catalog status, preserves a read-only reproducibility copy, redirects new-use workflows, publishes reasons and exceptions, assigns migration owners and deadlines, and notifies registered dependents. A same-day meaning debrief and a later drift-and-harm audit can repair or retire the observance itself.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Explicit and contestable meaning claim","domain_realization":"The assembly claims that ending approved new use is a stewardship act that preserves truth and memory; it does not declare the retiring package worthless or invalidate all work previously performed with it."},{"archetype_element":"Participant and affected-party boundary","domain_realization":"Package authors, custodians, reviewers, successor maintainers, and downstream users have differentiated standing, including standing to contest the retirement narrative without attending the assembly."},{"archetype_element":"Legitimacy, consent, and exit","domain_realization":"Technical retirement authority remains with the catalog governance board, while participation, visibility, testimony, and acceptance of any new obligation remain separately voluntary."},{"archetype_element":"Marked time, place, and trigger","domain_realization":"The observance occurs quarterly only for packages that have completed a documented technical retirement review, separating evidence evaluation from symbolic closure."},{"archetype_element":"Symbolic frame and shared narrative","domain_realization":"A visible lineage from origin to successor frames scientific tools as temporary custodial achievements rather than permanent monuments to their creators."},{"archetype_element":"Recognizable script and plural participation","domain_realization":"The sequence moves through threshold, provenance, witnessed contribution and limitation, bounded silence, use-boundary reading, obligation transfer, and operational closure, with multiple nonverbal and refusal paths."},{"archetype_element":"Recognition connected to material consequence","domain_realization":"Recognition of past contribution is followed by versioned catalog changes, preserved artifacts, redirects, notifications, migration work, and named responsibility rather than substituting for them."},{"archetype_element":"Memory and intergenerational handoff","domain_realization":"The retirement record preserves the package's purpose, limitations, decisions, successors, and unresolved questions without leaving founders in permanent control."},{"archetype_element":"Feedback, repair, and retirement","domain_realization":"Participants and affected nonparticipants can challenge misleading history, coerced visibility, inaccessible participation, or ineffective closure, triggering correction, pause, or termination of the assembly format."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"ritual_retirement_or_repair_ceremony","role":"Provides an interpretable ending that releases the package from approved new use while preserving provenance and transferring live obligations.","counterfactual_removal":"Without an explicit discharge sequence, retirement remains a technical label or silent disappearance, leaving ambiguous use boundaries, memory, and custody."},{"mechanism_slug":"story_myth_or_origin_reenactment","role":"Retraces the package's provenance, original design problem, revisions, limitations, and succession while inviting correction of flattering or founder-centered accounts.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the lineage account, users may remember only that the package was replaced and lose the reasoning needed to interpret prior analyses or future method choices."},{"mechanism_slug":"witnessing_and_public_recognition","role":"Consenting authors, reviewers, and users acknowledge both genuine contributions and documented limitations so retirement is not experienced or presented solely as repudiation.","counterfactual_removal":"Without witnessed recognition, identity threat may remain unaddressed and the closure may be interpreted as erasure; recognition is omitted for anyone who does not consent to visibility."},{"mechanism_slug":"silence_reflection_and_lament_interval","role":"Creates a short, framed interval for unresolved uncertainty, attachment, disagreement, or professional loss without requiring disclosure or consensus.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the interval, the assembly may rush from praise to closure and suppress ambiguity; if silence becomes theatrical or substitutes for technical response, it should be removed."},{"mechanism_slug":"collective_commitment_renewal","role":"Custodians and successor maintainers explicitly accept, revise, transfer, or decline concrete preservation, migration, documentation, and support obligations.","counterfactual_removal":"Without active re-consent, residual duties can remain attached to obsolete roles or assumed to transfer automatically with the catalog status."},{"mechanism_slug":"ritual_access_and_consent_review","role":"A pre-assembly reviewer tests power asymmetries, author visibility, attribution, recording, remote access, accessibility, refusal, and the rights of absent downstream users.","counterfactual_removal":"Without veto-capable review, the observance could compel creators to endorse the retirement narrative or expose disagreement as professional disloyalty."},{"mechanism_slug":"after_ritual_meaning_debrief","role":"Compares the intended meaning of responsible closure with participant and affected-user experience and records corrections to narrative, access, and follow-through.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a prompt debrief, organizers may confuse orderly closure with legitimate closure and repeat misleading or exclusionary elements."},{"mechanism_slug":"ritual_drift_and_harm_audit","role":"Periodically tests whether assemblies have become formulaic celebrations, humiliations of superseded teams, defenses of leadership decisions, or substitutes for migration resources.","counterfactual_removal":"Without skeptical review and retirement authority, the format could persist after it ceases to improve understanding or begins distorting scientific governance."}],"causal_chain":["Technical deprecation identifies a scientific or operational reason to stop approving a projection package for new use, but does not necessarily dissolve its accumulated social legitimacy.","Continued attachment, incomplete provenance, and ambiguous downstream obligations keep the boundary between historical and new use socially uncertain.","A marked, governed assembly makes the ending collectively interpretable while separating recognition of prior contribution from endorsement of continued use.","The lineage account and witnessed limitations create a shared memory of why the package existed, what changed, and what remains uncertain.","Voluntary acceptance or transfer of residual duties exposes unsupported migration, preservation, notification, and successor responsibilities.","Authorized catalog changes and workflow redirects translate the enacted boundary into observable operational consequences while retaining a reproducibility copy.","The debrief identifies gaps between intended responsible closure and experienced erasure, coercion, or ambiguity.","Periodic audit and repair keep the symbolic form subordinate to accurate provenance, adequate migration support, and revisable technical governance."],"baseline":"The program uses technical review minutes, deprecation flags, release notes, email announcements, change logs, successor documentation, and catalog redirects. These remain the authoritative controls; the proposed assembly applies only where technically completed retirement still lacks a shared, consent-aware ending and a witnessed transfer of residual obligations.","nearest_rivals":["Automated deprecation warnings and workflow blocks: directly prevent accidental new use but do not preserve plural memory, recognize contribution, or secure accountable migration handoffs.","A methods-board retirement decision: supplies legitimate technical judgment but can leave authors and downstream users with an unexplained or socially contested boundary.","A migration workshop: helps users convert analyses but does not itself establish a recognized ending, distinguish historical from new use, or release obsolete custodial roles.","A versioned archive with provenance documentation: preserves reproducibility and reasoning but does not create a shared occasion for confronting limitations and transferring responsibility.","Immediate deletion of the package: creates an unmistakable boundary but damages reproducibility, conceals prior dependencies, and closes off orderly migration.","An appreciation event for the original team: provides recognition but can romanticize the package and lacks governed retirement, consent, scientific limitation, and operational follow-through."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The ritual layer is warranted only when a technically justified retirement remains socially ambiguous because the package carries shared memory, professional identity, and untransferred obligations; its contribution would be to make the ending interpretable and governable, not to determine scientific validity or replace catalog controls.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"Only the established climate-scenario governance board may approve retirement or exceptions after technical and uncertainty review. Catalog custodians execute versioned status changes. Facilitators, authors, witnesses, and participants have no retirement authority merely by performing or attending the assembly.","authorized_first_step":"Use a fictional package to co-design and dry-run the complete sequence with authors, custodians, successor maintainers, downstream users, and an independent consent reviewer; then test it on one package whose retirement and reproducibility plan have already been formally authorized, without changing any additional scientific status.","excluded_actions":["Using the assembly to decide scientific validity before technical review is complete","Deleting or altering projection files, metadata, uncertainty records, code, citations, or prior decision records","Representing retirement as proof that all prior analyses were invalid","Compelling authors, employees, contractors, students, or users to attend, speak, accept blame, display emotion, or affirm the retirement narrative","Using absence, silence, dissent, or refusal in performance, funding, authorship, promotion, or access decisions","Assigning migration or support work without ordinary managerial authority, resources, workload review, and explicit acceptance","Celebrating closure while leaving registered dependents without notice, successor guidance, or an exception process","Using sacred, funerary, Indigenous, religious, or culturally specific forms without legitimate standing and permission","Treating the ceremony itself as authorization to block workflows or alter the catalog"],"halt_rollback":"Any participant, affected user, or independent consent reviewer may halt the assembly for coercion, humiliation, inaccurate provenance, contested symbolism, inaccessible participation, privacy breach, or false claims about scientific authority. If halted before board confirmation, catalog status remains unchanged. If an execution error follows confirmation, custodians restore the prior versioned interface state while the board reviews the record; preserved scientific artifacts and valid technical decisions are not destroyed. The ritual form can be retired independently while ordinary deprecation and migration governance continues."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"The strongest counterevidence would show that versioned deprecation notices, redirects, archives, and migration assignments already produce an unambiguous and accepted boundary, or that the assembly increases identity threat and narrative distortion without uncovering dependencies or improving understanding.","problem_falsifier":"Before any assembly, a sample of authors, custodians, and downstream users can independently identify the retirement reason, permitted historical uses, prohibited new uses, successor limitations, preservation location, exception route, and owners of every residual obligation, with no unresolved dependency or founder-controlled knowledge.","intervention_falsifier":"After a bounded pilot, participants are no better able to distinguish retirement from invalidation, no additional dependency or unsupported obligation is surfaced, operational closure remains incomplete, or credible reports indicate coerced visibility, retaliatory pressure, inaccurate history, suppressed dissent, or ceremonial substitution for migration resources.","risks":["The observance may stigmatize authors of superseded methods or turn scientific correction into personal blame.","Public recognition may pressure reluctant authors into visibility or imply endorsement of the retirement decision.","A simplified lineage narrative may erase contested choices, uncertainty, external contributors, or downstream adaptations.","Ceremonial finality may encourage deletion or discourage legitimate historical and sensitivity analyses.","Leadership may use the assembly to sanctify a predetermined decision or mute continuing technical disagreement.","A successor package may be symbolically privileged before its limitations and migration costs are understood.","The event may substitute for documentation, user support, compute resources, or funded migration work.","Repeated use may become rote, emotionally manipulative, inaccessible to distributed users, or disproportionately burdensome.","Catalog changes made during a poorly controlled performance could interrupt active analyses or compromise reproducibility."]},"next_evidence_step":"Run one 60-minute fictional-package dry run and, only after independent consent approval, one assembly for an already authorized, noncritical retired package. Before and immediately after, anonymously ask authors, custodians, and downstream users to state the retirement reason, historical-use boundary, successor limitations, archive location, exception route, and migration owners. Record newly identified dependencies, unsupported obligations, provenance corrections, felt pressure, access failures, and whether every ceremonial statement matches the technical record. Stop if the assembly changes no actionable understanding or if any credible coercion, humiliation, or authority confusion appears.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Proposal 1 addresses prospective continuity of field observations by renewing seasonal sampling and custody commitments before work begins; its failure state is an unowned link in a station-to-archive chain, and its causal path runs through visible responsibility mapping, witnessed handoff, and task assignment. This proposal addresses the socially ambiguous ending of an obsolete climate-projection package after technical retirement review; its failure state is continued or confused use of a deprecated scientific artifact, and its causal path runs through provenance reenactment, recognition of contribution and limitation, deconsecrating closure, preservation, migration, and release of obsolete roles. It is independently adoptable by a scenario-catalog governance program and does not require or extend the seasonal monitoring muster.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Initial complete proposal at proposal_index 2; no prior revision targets."],"conceptual_changes":["Introduces a distinct problem centered on the governed retirement of climate-projection artifacts rather than continuity of environmental observations."],"operational_changes":["Specifies a post-review sunset assembly with separate technical authority, reproducibility preservation, catalog execution, migration ownership, exception handling, and rollback."],"evidence_changes":["Defines a fictional dry run and one already-authorized retirement pilot measuring boundary comprehension, dependency discovery, provenance accuracy, consent, and authority clarity."],"claim_changes":["Limits the claim to a conditional role for ritualized closure where technical deprecation remains socially ambiguous; no novelty, prevalence, demand, or effect claim is made."]}}