What is institutional debris?
Institutional debris is the record of what people did to keep a formal system functioning: workarounds, overrides, tickets, grievances, and exception codes.
Explainers
The ideas the standards rest on, one page each: what the term means, a made-up case where it matters, what to look for in a real system, and which standards use it.
Read these first
In the order the argument runs: where the evidence of an error collects, who can challenge it, what authority has to be renewed, and how the repair is recorded.
Error-bearing parties
The people who absorb a system's errors are the first to see failures and the last able to act, unless they have standing to challenge the system.
What is AI contestability?
AI contestability is the ability to challenge an AI or other automated decision and get a review by someone with the authority to change it.
Authority as a lease
A grant of authority is held for a term against a renewable justification, not owned outright.
What is justified delegation?
A delegation lets a system decide for an organization. It is justified only while its permission, its evidence, and the capacity to correct its errors all still hold.
What is a repair log?
A repair log records each repair made after a system harms someone, what it cost the people repaired, and the receipt and owner for each.
Open weights and the delegation boundary
Ethotechnics takes no side on open or closed weights. It classifies a deployment by nine properties and governs the assembled system, not the model.
Three kinds of reversibility
Technical, operational, and institutional reversibility are separate claims, and only the third decides whether a correction will ever be used.
Typed decision models and where their authority lives
A typed decision model returns a choice and a confidence, not text. It is governed like any system allowed to decide, and the standards name six places its authority sits.
What are ethical interrupts?
Ethical interrupts are deliberate checkpoints that pause automation when risk thresholds are crossed.
What is a burden index?
A burden index measures the minutes, retries, and documents a system demands from people who comply, challenge, or recover.
What is a consent journey?
A consent journey maps how consent is requested, renewed, revoked, and recorded over time.
What is a permission surface?
The permission surface is the set of authority grants in force, each with an evidence basis, a scope, a state, and an expiry.
What is a safety valve?
A safety valve routes cases to a logged fallback path, often human review, when automation is overloaded, uncertain, or error-prone.
What is an intervention specification?
An intervention specification replaces “human in the loop” with six answerable questions about who can change the system.
What is design authority?
Design authority names the accountable owner who can approve, change, or halt a system’s design.
What is stoppability?
Stoppability is the ability to halt an automated process: for the person inside it, without penalty; for the institution, by a named person, in a set time.
What is time to halt (TTH)?
Time to halt (TTH) is the time between a request to halt an automated system and the moment it stops acting.
Longer explainers
Arguments that need more than a definition, a checklist, and phrasing to reuse.
Governance as operational capability
Governance measured by what a running system can be made to do: answer a challenge, change the rule, halt, and reverse.
Public memory for contestability terms
A dated log of how governance terms drifted into labels, with definitions to cite instead.
Remedy essentials for accountable systems
The eight mechanisms a remedy process needs, grouped by when each one acts.
Can this decision be challenged?
Seven pass/fail questions to run over a decision flow before it ships or when it is audited.
Language people can use
Questions a person can send when an automated decision is made about them, one ask each.