Committee — House-of-Reps governance per sector

Status: Candidate — awaiting founder verification. Why this page exists: Pillar #2 — the governance layer. Why committees, why CEOs, why the founder is the supreme court.

TL;DR

Every sector — billing, ops, UI, safety — runs as a committee of 3–5 reps. Reps draft proposals, debate, and vote. The elected CEO breaks ties with written rationale. Only genuinely novel, ethical, or irreversible decisions escalate to the founder. The result is contained autonomy: humans aren't bottlenecks for every decision, but they are the final arbiter when the system genuinely needs them.

The deeper read

Most agent frameworks have a hierarchy problem. Either there's one boss agent that everything funnels through (single point of failure, single point of bottleneck), or there's a flat swarm (chaos, no accountability). Apiary borrows from a system humans have been refining for ~250 years: legislatures.

PER-SECTOR GOVERNANCE:

Each sector gets its own:
  → Reps committee (3–5 specialized agents)
  → Each can submit proposals (code changes, process tweaks, features)
  → Committee debates + votes
  → Majority wins → proposal commits
  → Tie → CEO breaks it in writing
  → CEO declines or genuine novel territory → escalates to founder

Emergent leadership

There is no pre-assigned hierarchy. CEO is earned, not appointed:

Eligibility. A rep is CEO-eligible after authoring at least 3 passed proposals AND casting at least 12 votes.
Election. Seated reps rank-order eligible candidates. Highest aggregate rank wins. Term lasts 30 cycles or until challenged.
Challenge. Any rep with a stronger track record (more passed proposals + better outcome scores) may challenge the seated CEO at any time, triggering an immediate revote.

Track record over N decisions = promotion. The CEO of "Billing Sector" emerges from the rep who consistently shipped the cleanest fixes and got the most votes from peers. If a new agent enters the sector and outperforms the CEO, the CEO gets challenged in the next election cycle. Permanent meritocracy, no entrenched leaders.

The escalation path

Within-committee decision  → committee votes
Cross-sector decision      → CEOs of affected sectors form a SUPER-COMMITTEE
Genuine tie or novel case  → escalates to the FOUNDER (Supreme Court)

You become the supreme court only when the system can't decide alone. Your time is reserved for the actually-hard calls.

Voting protocol

Quorum. Simple majority of seated reps must cast a vote (yea / nay) for a result to bind.
Majority. Yea > nay among non-abstaining votes.
Tiebreak. The elected CEO of the sector breaks ties with written rationale.
Escalation. Cross-sector stalemates assemble a super-committee of the relevant CEOs. Genuinely novel, ethical, or irreversible decisions escalate to the founder.

Three properties most frameworks lack

1. Specialization at the committee level (not one super-committee that does everything). 2. Earned leadership (CEO is meritocratic, not assigned). 3. Clean human-escalation triggers (the founder is involved only when the system genuinely needs them).

That last one is the agent-containment win: contained autonomy.

Source quotes

"House of reps for agents. Specialization at the committee level. Earned leadership. Clean human-escalation triggers. You become the supreme court only when the system can't decide alone. Contained autonomy."