Governance Artifacts

• Use when: Use when naming, filing, citing or classifying any artifact that shapes what a model or human may do, must do, or how, and when a document, essay or ticket reaches for "policy" as a catch-all.
• Skip when: Skip for the content of any one kind (its own doc governs that) and for the ledger's internal shape (klappy://canon/definitions/dolcheo-vocabulary).
• Stop when: Stop when every artifact in scope sits in exactly one row of the two tables below with its question, speed and home named.
• Keep going when: Keep going while an artifact fits two rows, or "policy" is used for a per-build mandate (see The Ruling on "Policy").
• Where: Any repo that carries governance: klappy.dev canon, project cookbooks, the kitchen's hygiene, boarding manifests.
• Who: Whoever files, cites or reviews a governance artifact; the law seat adjudicates disputes of kind.
• Why: Gates check by kind; a misfiled kind is skipped by the gate built for it (klappy://canon/meta/policies-vs-requirements).
• What: Nine governance kinds, six consumers, one feeding record, one retired umbrella, two rulings recorded (umbrella = governance artifacts; policy = P0011; five-part artifact = mandate).
• How: Classify by the question answered (The Governance Kinds, The Consumers); amendments the rulings imply are listed under The Ruling on "Policy".

Governance artifacts are everything that constrains, directs or shapes behaviour in a program and outlives the session that wrote it. Canon's README already calls these "governance artifacts" and files them in values/, principles/, constraints/, definitions/, decisions/ and methods/, with /canon/** internal and /odd/ public (klappy://canon/README). This definition adds the two axes that classification turns on: the question an artifact answers and the speed at which it changes. Collapsing kinds of different speed under one word is a suspected root cause of steering failures (klappy://canon/meta/policies-vs-requirements), and the ARS monolith freeze of 2026-07-16 is the recorded instance: code ran ahead of policy, and no enforcer could measure the drift (klappy://docs/appendices/epoch-11).

Not everything that touches governance is governance. Methods apply it and are explicitly not a place to smuggle authority (klappy://canon/methods). Contracts and schemas are the interfaces two lanes share. Lenses and hygiene are review and operating surfaces. Charters are not: a charter grants authority and names what is reserved, which is governance, so it is a kind. Skills are procedure (klappy://canon/principles/skills-are-procedure-not-judgment). The ledger is the record whose entries are promoted into kinds at a breakpoint (klappy://canon/definitions/dolcheo-vocabulary). Keeping those apart is most of the work this definition does.

Confidence: a working definition, drawn from one program's three months of usage, held until a case breaks a row.

Precedence among these is canon's own ladder — manifesto, maturity, constraints, decision rules, evidence policies — and apparent conflicts are usually explained by maturity context rather than by rank (klappy://canon/README). Speed is a classification axis here, not a precedence rule.

"Charter" has carried four senses in the record as of 2026-10-09: the stewardship charter over a repo or project, the ticket or seat charter (TICKET.md § Charter, boarding manifests), the successor charter a session hands forward, and "chartering" a client deliverable (klappy://canon/definitions/cooking-taxonomy). All four are the one kind above at different scopes. One overload is retired: the cooking taxonomy's "recipe ≈ charter" line equates a method with a grant; a recipe is a method, and a charter is what authorizes someone to cook it.

The ledger (decisions, observations, learnings, constraints-as-found, handoffs, opens, tensions) feeds the set and is fed by nothing in it. How the beats of the loop consume each kind is the two-loop operating model's to say, not this document's.

Canon held two definitions, both active on 2026-10-09:

They were written two days apart from the same incident and pointed in opposite directions on speed. The captain ruled 2026-10-09 19:33 ET for option 2 (stated as "I think"; held as a ruling, revisable): P0011 wins; the anatomy-shaped artifact is renamed. The captain named it mandate (2026-10-09 20:00 ET): a governance kind of its own, typically carried inside a charter. The options as they stood:

1. Anatomy wins; P0011 amended. "Policy" = the enforceable per-build statement. Durable guidance is simply "principles." P0011's split becomes principles vs requirements.
2. P0011 wins; anatomy renamed. "Policy" = durable guidance. The five-part per-build artifact gets its own name (a "mandate," a "build policy," the captain's word).
3. Both, scoped. "Policy" alone is forbidden; every use says which: canon policy (durable) or build policy (anatomy-conformant).

Follow-ups this ruling implied — done 2026-10-09 (mandate relabel train): enforceable-policy-anatomy retitled as the mandate anatomy (uri unchanged); policy-precedes-build, policy-first-self-building-self-documenting and two-loop-operating-model amended where they meant the per-build artifact; the name mandate confirmed by the captain.

Closest prior art outside the program: "policy hierarchy" and "governance framework" in enterprise architecture; both name tiers of authority rather than kinds by question and speed, which is the distinction this document keeps.

• 2026-07-15, uW office: the correction that a principle needs context to apply and a policy does not; recorded only in the captain's Bee transcripts (conv 9248646, paraphrased; attribution is the captain's). 2026-07-18 log (conv 9312909): accepts that not everything is a policy and splits requirements out.
• 2026-07-16: ARS monolith freeze. In epoch-11's words, a correctly boarded seat built a thing no policy ever authorized, because code ran ahead of policy and no enforcer could measure the drift.
• 2026-07-17 → 2026-07-20: enforceable-policy-anatomy, policy-precedes-build and policies-vs-requirements filed; the first two ratified 2026-10-09, the third landed 2026-07-20.
• 2026-08-04 → 2026-10-07: captain's logs enumerate policies, requirements, constraints, principles, observations, schemas, contracts, lenses, charters as distinct; "ontology stack" appears 2026-09-16; no umbrella settled.

• No document, essay or ticket uses "policy set" or "policies" for the whole; use "governance artifacts," or the specific kind.
• "Policy" means P0011's durable guidance; a per-build five-part artifact is a mandate, never a bare "policy."
• Methods, contracts, schemas, lenses, hygiene and skills are filed as consumers, never as governance kinds.
• A kind that fits two rows is a tension for the ledger, not a reason to add a row.

Cost of adopting this: every existing "policy" in cookbooks and canon needs its kind named once. Reversible: it is a definition; retracting it costs a doc, not a migration. Disconfirmer: a governance artifact that two careful readers classify differently by the question-and-speed test, and that no row amendment resolves.

Hand a reviewer any governance artifact with its title covered. If they can name its kind from the question it answers and the speed it changes at, and that kind matches where it is filed, the definition holds. If they reach for "it's a policy, sort of," it does not.