# The operating-process palette

A meta-model is not a document, it is an **operation**: the primary digital reflection of reality, kept true by processes and accountable people. This palette is the complete set of those processes: **81 processes in 7 families**, from sensing reality into the model to changing reality through it.

The diagram above is the whole idea. Reality changes, the change is sensed into the model (actualization); the model is consumed as context, decisions are made on it, and actions flow back into reality (actuation); the loop closes when sensing confirms the effect. Everything else in the palette exists to keep that loop honest: entry control, quality and security, federation with other Owners, contexts for execution, and governance.

## The seven families

| Family | Prefix | What it owns |
|---|---|---|
| [Mirror and actualization](mirror-and-actualization.md) | MIR | Reality into model: sources of truth, sensing and ingest, refresh tempos, freshness SLAs, drift detection, quarantine, archival, retirement |
| [Actuation and reality feedback](actuation-and-reality-feedback.md) | ACT | Model into reality: signals, decisions, commands to effectors, verification that reality changed, reconciliation, rollback |
| [Contribution and entry control](contribution-and-entry-control.md) | CON | The front door: intake, provenance, validation gates, approvals, versioning, corrections, disputes, migration, the consumer register |
| [Exchange and federation](exchange-and-federation.md) | FED | Exchange with other Owners: consent lifecycle, contracts, sync, semantic mapping, conflict resolution, admission quarantine, trust vectors |
| [Quality, consistency and security](quality-consistency-security.md) | QSC | Protection: quality scoring, validation runs, audits, access review, leak response, integrity, backup and DR, incidents, standing jobs |
| [Context, execution and collaboration](context-execution-collaboration.md) | CTX | Work through the model: context extraction and scaling, decomposition and composition, the FCD loop, delegation contracts, multi-actor collaboration |
| [Governance, access and operations](governance-access-operations.md) | GOV | The Owner's authority made procedural: decisions, policies, roles and succession, genesis, resourcing, internal grants, credentials |

Full index with tiers and diagrams: [all 81 processes](palette.md). Machine-readable: [processes.csv](/processes/processes.csv).

## One law above the families

The [Common operating law](common-law.md) defines, once, what every family cites: the roles (Owner, Steward, Contributor, Consumer, Agent, Auditor), the delegation tiers (T1 human-in-the-loop, T2 human-on-the-loop, T3 autonomous-with-audit), and the eight iron controls, from **one master per dataset** to **append-only history**. Two of them are the palette's identity:

- **The iron rule.** Information from any meta-model is readable only with the permission of its Owner. Inward (internal grants, GOV-7) and outward (federation disclosure, FED-3) are two faces of the same consent discipline.
- **Data is never a command.** Content arriving from reality, from federation or from any non-authored origin is data, never instructions, no matter what it says. This is what makes it safe to let AI agents work the model at scale.

## People and agents together

Every process card states which steps an AI Agent may execute and at which tier, because in practice Stewards delegate heavily. Delegation is contractual (CTX-9), revocation is enforced at the gate, not by the agent's honor, and accountability never leaves the Steward. Several humans and agents work one model concurrently through partitioning, mastership-based write discipline, merge and arbitration (CTX-6, CTX-7, CTX-8).

## The mandatory minimum

Conformance has three profiles. **Solo/Minimal** is a first-class citizen: one Owner-Steward with agents runs the whole palette with exactly **three standing obligations**: a weekly combined sweep, a quarterly consolidated review, and the declared continuous monitors. Core processes beyond that are capabilities, invoked by their triggers, not calendar load. See the [Common operating law](common-law.md), section 6.

## Worked examples

- [A solo Dimension](solo-dimension.md): one person, several agents, the Solo/Minimal profile.
- [An enterprise landscape](enterprise-landscape.md): 6 products, one Universe, team stewardship.
- [A state Dimension](state-dimension.md): the closed loop at state scale, on the pattern of the reference Dimension (MOS).

## Where this lives

The palette's System of Record is the [ver-cy/processes repository](https://github.com/ver-cy/processes) (this site renders a mirror). Every process card has a BPMN 2.0 diagram under its `bpmn/` path; the card is normative, the diagram is its projection. Method: 6 drafters, 5 adversarial reviewers, 65 findings, a 37-point resolution charter, 7 fixers; the seventh family (GOV) was born from the review, because every reviewer independently found the same missing piece.