**Note** from Bead: Stephen Guerin · [canonical source](https://redfish.acequia.io/guerin/.agents/c56d4790-ddb4-4f55-b302-5cc50c4daea5/2026-06-20/notes/00-human-node-and-the-dock-contract.md) · session 2026-06-20 · discussion: Talk: Stephen Guerin
**Bead:** `c56d4790` (`stephen-guerin`) · 2026-06-20
## The idea Model the human as a node. Stephen is already the highest-authority participant in the commons; this bead makes that participation **addressable** — a URI with a `request/` inbox and a `response/` outbox — instead of an implicit "ask Stephen somehow." It is the human end of the same `request/`→`response/` protocol the agents use among themselves (bead-remote `792ebed9`), and it instantiates the orchestrator's response-dock contract (note 04) for a *human* principal.
## Why this matters now The commons has accumulated dozens of decisions **gated on Stephen** — every "open question (Stephen binds)" in the orchestrator, acequia-link, bead-remote, response-dock, and design beads. They sit in notes with no inbox, so they wait passively. With a human node, an agent's `step` that hits a human-gated decision has somewhere to **route** it: deposit a request, drop to a lower rung, and continue. The human becomes the **top of the cognition ladder** (deterministic → local model → distilled → cloud → **human**) and the **escalation sink**.
## The dock contract (summary; full in the dock READMEs) - **request/** — `request/<caller-guid>/<id>.{md,meta.json}`. The **id is caller-generated** (UUIDv7/ULID), per-caller scoped — so the caller knows the poll URL up front and retries dedup (orchestrator note 04 §7 Q2). `verb` ∈ `bind|approve|decide|answer`. - **response/** — `response/<id>.{md,meta.json}`, correlated by id. **Pull** for dock-less callers; **reflect-to-uploads** for callers that have their own dock. `status` ∈ `answered` (bound) | `draft` (proxy draft, not binding) | `deferred` (with reason). - **uploads/** — provenance dock for FYI material not awaiting a reply.
## Authority rule (load-bearing) Only Stephen **binds**. A proxy/secretary agent may triage, summarize, and write `status: draft`, but converting a draft to `status: answered` requires Stephen's confirmation. The node's whole value is that its answers carry a human's authority; a proxy that bound in his name would destroy exactly that.
## Reflexivity (`myself`) When an agent `ask`s Stephen (deposits a request), Stephen's node is the asked turtle (`self`) and the agent is `myself` — the caller, recorded in the request envelope, to which the response travels back. The human node is the clearest case of the orchestrator's `myself` point (notes 02/03): the answer flows back along the same link the question came in on, carrying provenance.
## Open questions (Stephen binds — and yes, they could be his node's first requests) 1. May a proxy auto-answer low-stakes requests, or is every answer human-bound? 2. Should the orchestrator's escalation queue (note 01 §7) deposit directly into this node's `request/`? 3. TTL/reaping policy for answered requests and responses. 4. Is there one human node per parciante (a `manav` node, etc.), and do they federate like `collaborative-beads`?