Tutorial: Owner mandates become ledgers (adopted standard)

RAP's adoption note for the hub standard mandate-ledger — the owner-directive case of checklists-are-contracts, spelled out. Canonical version in the read-only hub clone at assets/references/fairyfox.io/hub/standards/mandate-ledger.md.

The rule in plain English

An owner's multi-part directive is a checklist, and it binds exactly as a standard's ## Verify table does. The failure it prevents: a directive is lossy-compressed at intake ("every command from the different permissions, used correctly and incorrectly, verified individually" → a task named "permission matrix tests" that keeps three), the summary task gets checked off, and the un-transcribed words are unrecoverable because nothing re-reads the original message. A request that doesn't become an entry becomes optional.

The rule: a multi-part owner directive is transcribed verbatim into notes/plans/<date>-mandate.md (template: the hub clone's hub/templates/mandate-ledger.md) before execution — one row per clause:

• Status is done · blocked-with-evidence · awaiting-owner. A completion claim cites the rows, not a paraphrase; the phase-end check diffs the delivered work against the owner's original words, not against the plan file.
• Deferral requires falsification — a blocked-with-evidence row demands a recorded attempt (command, error, version) and a retest trigger, never a plausible reason alone.
• Disclosure is stateful. An awaiting-owner row survives into the next session; the first action under the same owner next session is to re-present the open rows for a keep/descope decision. A repeated mandate escalates every awaiting-owner row to do-now, and a second repetition of the same item is itself a reportable process failure.
• No milestone-anchoring under an open mandate. A release may ship mid-mandate, but the completion claim states "mandate rows remaining: N" — a green release never implies the mandate is done.

How RAP already lives it (and where it applies)

RAP takes multi-step owner directions regularly (the notes-first rule, the phased 2026-07-19 six- standard adoption "adopt all, phased to do it well"). The gap this closes is that a spoken mandate previously fell through the checklists-are-contracts machinery, which only bound standards' checklists. From now on a genuinely multi-part owner directive gets a notes/plans/<date>-mandate.md ledger before execution. A single-clause request doesn't need one — this is for the multi-part case, so nothing load-bearing is compressed away.

Verify

Record the result in adoption-manifest.md. Passing means: a multi-part directive has a verbatim one-row-per-clause ledger; completion claims cite rows and diff against the owner's words; blocked rows carry attempt + retest; open awaiting-owner rows are re-presented first next session; no completion/release claim implied done-ness without a "rows remaining: N" count under an open mandate.