The Dance: Agency in Motion - evomimic/map-holons GitHub Wiki

🌀 Promise Weave + Governance Scaffold Spec

(Extended with Key MAP Architectural Features)

🎭 The Dance: Agency in Motion

In the MAP, Cells are not static entities — they are active, living agents.
They don’t just hold information — they do things. They offer affordances — ways others can interact with them.

We call these Dances — activatable actions, behaviors, or services that a Cell exposes through a Promise.

A Dance is the moment when a Cell's intent becomes action — through interaction.

📡 Interaction Protocols in Agreements

Every Agreement can optionally define one or more interaction protocols — the mechanisms through which Dances occur.

These protocols can be social or technical, and include:

MAP Native (decentralized, Holochain-compatible peer-to-peer protocols)
JLINC / JLINX (cryptographically signed interaction envelopes)
REST (traditional web API)
Ockham (event-sourced identity and consent frameworks)
Secure Scuttlebutt (gossip-based, local-first data sync)

Each Agreement may list:

Protocol endpoints
Expected data types (inputs/outputs)
Invocation rules or constraints
Revocation and re-negotiation paths

This creates a clear, machine-readable interface for how the Promise is invoked — and by whom.

🧾 Layered Agreement Architecture

MAP adopts a model inspired by Creative Commons' 3-level architecture:

Human-Readable
Natural language summary of the Promise and Agreement, understandable to all participants.
Machine-Readable
Structured schema, including capital flows, protocols, types, and governance references.
Legal-Readable
(Optional) Linkages to formal legal frameworks or smart contracts, to support enforceability in specific jurisdictions.

This layering ensures both accessibility and rigor — making agreements usable across technical, social, and legal dimensions.

🔐 Information Access Agreements

MAP prefers the term Information Access Agreement over Data Sharing Agreement — and here’s why:

A Data Sharing Agreement implies copying or giving away data.
An Information Access Agreement specifies revocable access rights — granted via Promise and governed via Trust Channels.

All data in MAP is:

Stored as self-describing, active holons
Described formally via Type Descriptors (defining properties, relationships, and constraints)
Bound to a Cell’s Data Grove — under that Cell’s control

By referencing the types and relationships in a Promise or Agreement, we can precisely define what access is being offered — and under what terms.

🛡️ Data Sovereignty by Design

MAP enforces data sovereignty as a foundational value:

Each Cell retains full control over its Data Grove
Access is granted through revocable Promises, not passive exposure
Trust Channels determine who can see what, when, and how long

Agreements may include:

Access conditions (e.g., only if trust score > 0.8)
Revocation logic (e.g., auto-expire in 30 days, or upon governance trigger)
Audit trails and event logs

Sovereignty is not just privacy — it's agency over one's information, capabilities, and relational flows.

🧠 All Powered by Holons and Type Descriptors

Because everything in MAP is represented as active, self-describing holons, every element of an Agreement or Promise is:

Queryable
Composable
Visualizable
Governable

By linking to holon types, property types, and relationship types, MAP can:

Define fine-grained access agreements
Render Dances and flows through a small number of reusable visualizers
Evolve schemas without breaking downstream coordination

🧭 Summary: The Dance of Agency

MAP enables Cells to:

Declare affordances (Dances)
Wrap them in consent-based Promises
Govern them through Agreements with layered structure
Enforce sovereignty via Trust Channels and Membranes
Visualize and evolve interactions through DAHN

This is not just protocol — it’s choreography.
The Promise Weave is the rhythm. The Governance Scaffold is the structure. The Dance is what brings it alive.

In MAP, agency flows like breath — sovereign, relational, and alive.