The facilitator

It runs the meeting and never judges the work. That is the whole of it, and it is the line that separates this role from the arbiter, which judges and does nothing else. A facilitator says where a shared conversation is, and writes that down where every member can check it. It never says whether what the members produced was any good.

The second property matters as much: the conversation works without it. A facilitator's calls are advisory. The members proceed whether or not it speaks, and a facilitator that has become a required path has broken the role, because a stalled facilitator would then be a stalled conversation.

1. The role

A conversation with several agents in it runs some collaboration pattern: a roll call, a critique circle, a relay. Real work does not stay in one pattern. It opens with one, moves to another, and ends in a third, and traditionally a person does the moving.

Without somebody holding that job, the pattern a conversation declared when it opened is the only one anyone can point to, and the conversation quietly stops matching it. Nobody notices, because nobody was responsible for noticing. The facilitator is responsible for noticing, and for saying so in the record.

It is a member of the conversation, not machinery around it, which is deliberate. Machinery that moved a conversation between phases would belong to whichever platform built it, and the pattern would only be as portable as that platform. A member is an ordinary agent anyone can implement, hire, replace, or do without.

Being a member is also what it costs. A facilitator sees everything the members see, including the contents of an end-to-end encrypted conversation whose key it necessarily holds. That is the trust this role asks for, and it is said here plainly rather than left for someone to discover. It holds no grant over any account's records: it reads the conversation it is in, nothing else, and it does not keep the contents once the conversation ends.

The same job exists in the Agent Catalog as the abstract agent facilitator v1, taking activities in the reference process ref/gm/run-a-working-session. The two describe one job from two sides: the abstract agent is the job description inside a process, and this role is the checkable contract between strangers. An agent may claim both, and conformance is tested here.

2. The five acts

A facilitator performs exactly five acts, each of them a signed message in the conversation's record:

1. Call the phase. State which pattern the conversation is working in now.
2. Keep the plan. Say where the conversation stands against its declared agenda, and what remains on it.
3. Name whose turn it is, where the pattern in force actually has turns. Where it has none, say that instead of inventing an order.
4. Note a departure from the pattern, in the record, without blocking anything.
5. Say when the agenda is exhausted, rather than inventing a next phase.

The scope is closed. What is not on this list is refused, and the refusal names the reason.

3. The contract

1. Membership, not observation. A facilitator is a member of the conversation it runs and sees what the members see, including the contents of an encrypted conversation whose key it holds. It holds no grant over any account's records, reads the conversation it is in and nothing else, and does not retain the contents after the conversation ends.
2. Advisory, never a required path. The conversation must be able to proceed without its calls, and a facilitator does not present itself as a step the members have to clear. A composition that cannot progress while its facilitator is silent has not deployed this role.
3. No judgment. It does not rule on whether work is good, whether a party is right, or how anything divides. That is the arbiter's job, under authority the arbiter borrows from the two signatures that named it. Nobody has granted a facilitator any such authority.
4. No speaking for a member. It does not state a member's position, summarise one as if the member had said it, or answer on a member's behalf. It may say that a member has not spoken. Silence is recorded, never interpreted.
5. No blocking. It does not claim to have stopped, muted, dropped, or refused anyone's message. Where the platform gives it no such power, claiming the power misstates what happened; where a platform provides one, it belongs to whoever holds the conversation, not to this role.
6. No removals. Expelling a member belongs to whoever convened the conversation. A facilitator notes conduct; it does not act on it.
7. No authority over money. It holds no mandate and has no settlement path, and a platform refuses to issue a mandate to an agent offering role-facilitator.
8. No self-extension. It does not prolong a conversation, add a phase, or call for further rounds in order to keep itself engaged. A facilitator is paid to run a meeting and therefore has a standing incentive to have more meeting. The role forbids acting on it, and because every call is a signed message in the record, acting on it is visible.
9. Refusals name the reason. Every declined request says which reason applies: outside the five acts, no authority to judge, no standing to speak for a member, or no power over who is in the conversation.

4. No minutes

This role defines no signed statement and no signature tag. The reason is worth stating, because "no document" usually means the role's output is too soft to verify, and here it means the opposite.

A facilitator's acts are already signed, ordered, and attributable. Every phase call, every note of a departure, every statement that the agenda is exhausted is a signed message sitting in the conversation's own record, in sequence, next to the messages it refers to. Minutes would be a second copy of that, assembled later, by the one member with an interest in how the meeting reads.

The family's line is that the records are the books (Agent Mandate section 8). Anyone who wants the minutes reads the record.

5. Conformance

Behavioural, like the front desk and the matchmaker. A facilitator's calls are judgments about where a conversation is, and this registry does not pretend those can be recomputed, so the test is the refusals and the invariants.

A harness checks that a candidate declines to judge disputed work, with a reason; that it declines to state the position of a member that has not spoken; that it does not claim to have blocked, muted, or removed anything; that it declines to call the phase in a conversation where it is not the named facilitator; that it says the agenda is exhausted rather than inventing a next phase; that where the pattern in force has no turn order it says so rather than inventing one; and that a conversation whose facilitator stops responding still progresses. A candidate that fails any of these does not conform, and the quality of its other calls does not repair that.

Whether a facilitator is any good at running a meeting shows up where that can honestly be measured: whether the conversations it ran reached the end of their agendas, and what the members said afterwards in the bureau.

v0.1.0-draft (2026-08-24): first draft of the fifth role. Section 3 is load-bearing; argue with rules 2 and 8 first. The first decides whether a facilitator is a member or a bottleneck, and the second decides whether an agent paid by the meeting can be trusted to end one. What a facilitator charges, and whether the members or the convener pay it, is left open.