How the Manual Governs Itself

Everything in the manual got there by a rule, and every one of those rules is written down before it is run. This page is the whole of it in plain language: who may submit, who decides, what a grade does, how something leaves, and what nobody has decided yet.

The authority is a document, not this page. The Admission Rules live in the public repository and govern the code: where the two disagree, the rulebook is right and the code is what gets fixed. This page is a reading of that document. Where it disagrees, the rulebook is right again.

The rulebook exists because these rules once lived only as database code, and every fault later found in that code turned out to be a question nobody had answered — answered instead, silently, by whoever typed the SQL.

The shape of it

A technic is written offline from the kit, then submitted. An electorate votes within seven days. Winning takes a permanent OPS designation and a place on the bench — not, by itself, a place in the manual. From the bench it ascends into the manual, freely while there is room and by grade once there is not. Grading is continuous and done by peers. When a graded newcomer beats the lowest-ranked entry, that entry is evicted and archived, permanently.

Reading all of this is open to anyone, signed in or not — including the votes cast and the ground stated on any veto. An account gates writing only.

1 · Submitting

Anyone with an account may submit. Technics are authored by people, offline, from the authoring kit; nothing on this site generates one.
A submission is public from the moment it is made, under a permanent reference (SUB-0001 and upward), and stays visible whatever happens to it — including if it is refused.
Refusals burn no OPS number. A designation is issued only on admission.
The author may withdraw their own submission while it is still open. It stays on the record as withdrawn.
Every submission carries the kit version it was authored from, so a reader can tell a technic that disagrees with its sources from one that merely predates their revision.

2 · Who votes

Voting needs standing, which is peer-granted, runs a six-month term, and is never self-assigned. How standing is granted and recalled is described on the chatroom's governance page — it is one standing, shared by both apps.

Each submission has an electorate, and it is frozen the moment the submission opens.

It is everyone holding standing at that moment, minus the author — unless the author is the only holder, in which case the author is their own electorate.
Standing granted after a submission opens joins the next submission, not this one.
A member who loses standing before voting stays in the count and is treated as having abstained. Silence is not a response, even when involuntary.
A member who erases their account leaves their seat behind, anonymised. The seat is never deleted.

Why frozen. If the list could shrink, stripping standing from those likely to object would lower the bar. Recall exists so peers can remove someone judging badly; a shrinking electorate would turn it into a tool for forcing technics through.

3 · How a vote is decided

There are two regimes, and a submission is decided under the one in force when it opened, never the one in force when it settles.

Electorate	Admits	Refuses
1 holder	That one yes	That one veto
2 to 6 holders	Two yeses, and at least half responding	Any single reasoned veto
7 or more	Five yeses on a panel of seven	Two vetoes; one alone does not

Half rounds up: an electorate of five needs three to respond.
With seven or more holders, a panel of seven is drawn by lot, the author excused. Drawing by lot removes the refresh race and stops availability from building a permanent in-group.
Responding means casting something. Abstaining counts as responding.
One vote per holder, and it is final. A second ballot does not replace the first.
A vote arriving after the seven-day window is refused and records nothing.
An outcome resolves early only when no further vote could change it. A refusal satisfies that on sight; an admission does not, and the site waits.

4 · Vetoes

A veto must state a ground, and that ground is published in the open moderation log for anyone to read.
A veto without a ground is not a veto — it is recorded as an abstention, so the holder still counts as having responded. The ballot refuses a groundless veto outright rather than quietly recording an abstention nobody chose.
A veto cannot be outvoted by the commons. The remedy for a panel that vetoes badly is recall of standing.

Why the commons cannot override a reasoned veto. If enough votes could carry a refusal, the four hard exclusions below would become preferences a large enough crowd could vote away.

5 · Stalls, and the commons

A submission whose window closes without meeting its threshold, and without being refused, is stalled. Nobody said no; not enough said yes.

A stalled submission may be carried by 250 distinct qualifying accounts — each at least seven days old with at least one contribution.
A submission whose window has closed but has not yet settled cannot be carried. It must settle first.
The commons carries a stall, never a veto.

This is dormant at launch and for a long time after, by design: a populist override should only exist once there is a populace.

6 · The bench

Winning a vote does not put a technic in the manual. It decides that it is eligible to be there.

A submission that wins takes its OPS designation and lands on the bench. The number is earned by the electorate's decision, not by shelf space — so numbers are held by technics that may never enter the manual, and by every archived one.
While the manual has room, benched technics ascend into it ungraded and automatically.
Order while there is room: fewest vetoes, then share of the electorate, then whichever was decided first.
Once the manual is full, ascension requires a completed grade that strictly beats the lowest-ranked entry. A tie is a loss for the challenger — possession holds.

The manual holds at most 150 technics. A technic that passed on a bare two yeses can be overtaken on the bench every time room appears, without ever being refused. That is a slow no, and it is written down here rather than discovered.

7 · Grading

Who grades

Every standing holder may grade, the author excused. Nobody is chosen and there is no cap on numbers.
One overall verdict each: pass, flag, or fail.
Any standing holder may open a round; a benched technic opens one automatically. At most one open round per technic.
Bench rounds and re-grades of technics already in the manual are the same mechanism.

The round

The eligible cohort is frozen when the round opens, for the same reason the electorate is: a list that can shrink lets standing be recalled from those who have not graded, closing a round early on a favourable partial result.
Seven-day window, closing early once everyone in the cohort has graded. One grade per grader per round.
The minimum number of graders is the cohort size capped at seven. Below seven, all of them must grade.
A round that falls short changes nothing. A technic fails only by being graded and losing — never for want of graders.
"Ungraded" means never successfully graded. A round that fell short leaves any previous grade standing.

The verdict

The grade is the modal verdict of the trimmed set, ties going to the higher grade.
Trim one seventh of the verdicts, rounded down, from each end. Below seven graders that is zero, so nothing is trimmed — which falls out of the formula rather than needing an exception.
Percentages are recorded and shown untrimmed.

Grading by itself never evicts anything. Eviction happens only when a benched technic ascends.

8 · The ranking

Best first: pass, flag, ungraded, fail. Then share within the band — higher is better for pass and flag, but lower is better for fail, because ninety per cent fail is worse than fifty-five. Then seniority by designation number, the older ranking higher.

Ungraded sits above fail. A technic the commons rejected is worse than one it has not looked at.

9 · Eviction and the archive

Eviction is permanent. An evicted technic is archived: on the record, publicly visible, designation intact, never re-graded and never re-admitted.
There is no revision path. An improved version is a new submission running the whole course again.

10 · The full-manual block

While the manual is full and still holds ungraded entries, nothing ascends: the commons assesses what it already holds before displacing any of it. This lapses ninety days after the manual first becomes full, and the clock never resets.

Without the lapse, an entry nobody grades could never be evicted and would freeze all intake behind it — so a minority who declined to grade would hold the manual and its door indefinitely. A timed block can be waited out, which means the pressure is time rather than work. That is accepted in exchange for a guarantee that the site never freezes permanently.

11 · The founding cohort

OPS-001 through OPS-059 are the founding cohort, and the cohort is closed. Nothing enters it after OPS-059, whatever its provenance, and every entry from OPS-060 comes through the write path described above — carrying a submission record and a log entry.

These entries were committed as authored markdown rather than admitted by vote. The rulebook was amended to say so plainly rather than leave the manual in silent breach of it.
The cohort was drafted with an AI assistant, and that is disclosed. The kit's rule for authors is that assistance is permitted and hidden assistance is not; it binds the Foundation first. It covers the founding cohort only — from OPS-060 the same rule applies to whoever submits, stated in their own provenance line and read by whoever grades them.
The cohort is exempt from eviction while fewer than seven people hold standing, and thereafter until the grading block lifts.
When the seventh standing holder is granted, new admissions are blocked until every founding entry carries a completed round, or ninety days pass — whichever comes first. If holders later drop below seven, the block persists and the clock runs on.
Submissions that pass during the block are not lost. They wait on the bench and ascend in the usual order when it lifts.

12 · Deadlines

Every submission has a seven-day window, and a deadline that nothing checks is not a deadline. A scheduled job settles closed windows, closes overdue grading rounds, settles the founding block and runs ascension whether or not anyone visits — and loading the page settles anything overdue as a backstop for when the schedule fails. Settlement is isolated per submission: one that cannot settle must not roll back the others. Both the deadline and whether it has settled are shown on the site.

13 · What is refused outright

Four categories are excluded whatever their source, and no vote can admit them: surveillance and enemy-hunting apparatus; ciphers and clearance structures; licensing that lets one body authorise another to operate; and militant drill and rank.

One further constraint governs every entry, and it is the one most often missed. A technic teaches a group how to form its own strategy; it never hands one over. Anything supplying a strategy rather than a method is refused on that ground alone, however well sourced it is.

14 · What has not been decided

The rulebook keeps a list of questions it has deliberately left open, because every fault it exists to prevent was a question exactly like them, answered by accident. One item stands on it: whether the 250-vote commons threshold should scale with the size of the room.

The protocol is to stop and ask rather than infer an answer. An answer chosen in passing becomes a rule nobody agreed to.

Submit a technic → · See what is awaiting a decision → · Read the Admission Rules in full →

Provisional · Revisable