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OWP

5. Cross-Cutting Requirements

This section specifies three requirements that apply across all primitives and artefacts. These are not themselves primitive — they are properties that every primitive must carry — and a conforming implementation MUST honour all three.

5.1 Provenance

Every Intent, every Signal accepted into the Workforce, every Capability invocation, and every Dispatch MUST carry provenance: the chain of prior events that gave rise to it.

The provenance chain MUST be machine-traversable through the Audit Envelope. Given any event in an Envelope, an inspector MUST be able to traverse to its originating Signal or top-level Intent.

The provenance chain MUST cross Workforce boundaries when work is federated. An Intent dispatched from one Workforce to another MUST carry provenance referring back to the source Workforce’s Envelope, and the receiving Workforce’s Envelope MUST refer forward to the source.

5.2 Cost

Every Capability invocation MUST emit a Cost Record (§10). The Cost Record is structural: it is part of the Capability invocation, not a side-effect logged separately.

Cost Records MUST be aggregable along the provenance chain. The runtime MUST be able to answer queries of the form:

  • “What did this Intent cost?”
  • “What did this Worker cost in the past 24 hours?”
  • “What did this Function cost across all Workforces in the past quarter?”
  • “What did this Capability Provider charge across the entire deployment in the past month?”

Cost is a first-class organisational concern. Treating it structurally — rather than as a separately-instrumented reporting concern — is the protocol’s mechanism for ensuring it can never drift out of sync with the work it accounts for.

5.3 Charter Binding

Every action a Worker takes MUST be authorised by an explicit clause in its Role’s Authority Grant. The runtime MUST verify the binding at the point of every action.

The verified binding MUST be recorded in the Audit Envelope: the event MUST reference both the Worker’s Role and the specific clause of the Authority Grant under which the action was permitted.

This requirement makes the Workforce’s behaviour analytically tractable. Every action in the Audit Envelope can be cross-referenced to the Charter under which it was authorised; deviations from the Charter are not possible at runtime, and historical inspection can confirm that none occurred.