📖What it means

Accountability versus authority. The OWNER of an artifact (service, app, droid, initiative) is the single agent accountable for it — its health, its records, its outcomes; ownership lives in the registry and follows the single-owner rule. The DECISION-MAKER for a given action is whoever holds the authority to decide THAT transition — which may not be the owner: a reviewer decides acceptance, an escalation authority decides blocking, the human admin decides UAT and scope. Signals flow from observers to the decision-maker; the decision-maker acts; the owner remains accountable for the artifact throughout. Asking 'who owns this?' and 'who decides this?' are different questions with possibly different answers. For INITIATIVES the owner is FIXED by rule (CAROL-INI-3015, Ninad 2026-07-19): the owner IS the requester - whoever requested the work owns it, stored as the canonical agent id; requests made by Ninad are owned by Orion (agt_023); the filing chokepoints stamp owner := requester on every channel and override any caller-supplied owner.

⚖️What it is NOT

The neighbours this word is most often confused with, and the line between them.

🧭The nuance

Carol: Merlin signals, Elrond blocks/escalates (the authority protocol); Ninad is the sole UAT decision-maker; Orion holds operator authority as the only human-in-loop agent, while pipeline authority stays with Elrond.

🗣️Also called

🔗Related ideas