Human or organization
A participant, operator, maintainer, reviewer, or organization with a declared role and contact path.
Bounded participants under constraint
Viability Nodes
Describe what a node is, what role it declares, what authority and memory it uses, what evidence supports it, and how review or exit remains possible.
Orientation
Visibility is not authority, and a label is not proof.
A viability node is a bounded participant or system surface whose identity, declared role, source domain, authority, memory, dependencies, review path, and exit condition can be inspected. The profile is an evidence-formatting pattern—not a score and not a certification.
Use a profile when a person or machine reader needs to distinguish what the node claims, what an implementer actually controls, which evidence is available, and where uncertainty or human review remains.
Scope
A node can be technical, institutional, human, or informational.
The common requirement is a reviewable boundary. Do not assume that discoverability, public metadata, or proximity within an ecosystem grants authority.
Assistant, bot, or agent
An automated actor with disclosed operator, authority envelope, memory basis, tool limits, and revocation path.
Endpoint or service
A capability surface whose public metadata is separated from actual consent and authorization.
Memory packet or repository
A bounded information surface with provenance, disposition, retention, review, and retirement rules.
Workflow or review queue
A process that changes state, visibility, access, interpretation, or obligation and leaves a reviewable trace.
Community or public site
A rule-bearing surface with named maintainers, versioned governance, repair routes, and exit conditions.
Evidence dimensions
Describe viability qualitatively before widening trust.
These dimensions organize evidence and questions. They are not a biological model, worker score, live telemetry feed, or universal viability metric.
| Dimension | Question to publish |
|---|---|
| Resource margin | Capacity available for justified action, maintenance, and review. |
| Maintenance burden | Ongoing cost of retaining a node, rule, memory, workflow, or public claim. |
| Dependency stability | Whether required sources, endpoints, operators, and review paths remain available. |
| Evidence sufficiency | Whether a proposed action, interpretation, or claim has enough source support. |
| Review bandwidth | Human or bounded-system capacity to evaluate material outcomes and repair errors. |
| Exit readiness | Whether export, revocation, correction, retirement, and offboarding remain usable. |
| Blocked growth | Expansion refused because evidence, authority, resources, or review capacity were insufficient. |
Workflow
Build the profile from claims outward to evidence.
- Assign a stable node identifier and actor type.
- Name the responsible operator, source domain, and declared role.
- Separate claimed capabilities from actual delegated authority.
- List memory, endpoints, dependencies, constraints, and evidence references.
- Publish review, repair, revocation, retirement, and exit conditions.
- Record unresolved questions and use no-op before claim widening.
Counterpart set
- Human template
- viability-node-profile.md
- Schema
- viability-node-profile.schema.json
- Example
- viability-node-profile.json
- Release
- v3.0.16 · 2026-06-21T02:42:50Z