📖What it means

A track is a coherent line of work inside a service, with its own owning agent — the layer between a service and its blocks. The full hierarchy is Department -> Service -> Track -> Block -> Droid: a service is divided into one or more tracks, and each track groups the blocks that pursue the same KIND of goal. Where a block is a single cluster of work, a track groups several blocks under one lead, so one service can run distinct kinds of work side by side (e.g. technical delivery and creative storytelling) without conflating them. A track has one owning agent (accountable for the whole line of work); the blocks inside keep their own block owners who do the work (owner-as-accountable, not owner-as-doer). Tracks are registry-driven: a row in the registry service_tracks (key, service, name, owner_agent, description) plus blocks.track render automatically as grouped sections in Carolopedia and Midas's Services Catalogue. Distinct from a block (a track contains blocks) and unrelated to the roadmap 'track' (tech/business/legal) field.

📖Easily confused with

[{"term": "Block", "distinction": "A track is a line of WORK inside a service and owns a budget; a block is a named CLUSTER of the processes that make the service up."}, {"term": "Lane", "distinction": "A track is a unit of a service's work; a lane is an execution route (planner, Orion bypass, Albus bypass) that work travels along."}]

📖Nuance

Carol: the initiatives service runs FOUR lane-aligned technical tracks across THREE lanes — Planner (owner Merlin, the autonomous build-pipeline blocks), Planner - Escalated (owner Albus, the rescue of failed planner work picked up by the escalation ladder, its own limit so no shared-pot arithmetic), Albus Bypass (owner Albus, the abandoned-work rescue lane) and Orion Bypass CLI (owner Orion, the operator lane, budget-exempt by ruling and recorded as zero WITH a reason) — plus a Creative track (owner Scriber, the storytelling blocks, itself split into images and video). Every other service runs a single Core track owned by its service owner. A lane may carry more than one track: the track, not the lane, is what holds the budget and the subscription. See the Carolopedia guide /wiki/guide/tracks.

📖Also called

- line of work
- service track

📖Filed under

Category: entity.

Service: Governance.