v1.38.0 — §15 Verification integrity

v1.38.0 - 2026-08-04

Protocol: new §15 Verification integrity. Ratified by idea
meta-protocol-change-verification-integrity (two design rounds, four consensus revisions, four
signoff rounds, two review rounds, two fix-up cycles).

The protocol had strong rules about who writes which artifact and no rules about what makes a
verification valid. A participant could stamp CONFIRMED on any claim — including its own —
with no stated basis, and two contradictory verdicts had nowhere to live and no resolution rule.

• §15.1 — scope, ownership, location. A claim enters the regime only when someone verdicts it,
  someone challenges it, or §15 requires it. Every participant that asserts a claim as true where
  it first appears canonically is an owner, and an owner MUST NOT verdict a claim it owns.
  Material transcribed and explicitly marked as unverified testimony is not owned by the
  transcriber — without that branch a facilitator could never verify anything it put in a brief.
• §15.2 — provenance. PRIMARY (source located and quoted, or a check the verifier executed
  with command, inputs and output quoted) / SECONDARY (a named participant's non-RECALL
  verdict, chain acyclic and terminating in PRIMARY) / RECALL (caps at UNVERIFIED).
  An untagged verdict is treated as RECALL — the scheme fails closed.
• §15.3 — conflicting verdicts. Resolved by reviewable evidence and argument, never by
  counting participants, including where the count is unanimous. Provenance controls
  admissibility; it does not select the winner. Unresolved → DISPUTED, which may not support any
  acceptance criterion. No new file.
• §15.4 — exemption-claim admissibility. A claim to avoid a named obstacle needs a witness
  logically sufficient for the scoped claim. Adjectives are not witnesses.
• §15.5 — role concentration. Facilitator procedural calls are provisional until the signoff
  gate passes. A facilitator-drafter must publish ## Drafter position changes with an exact prior
  quotation and source path per change.
• §15.6 — correlated agreement. On unanimous judgment-shaped ideas, consensus may not close
  without a steelman of the strongest alternative; a null result recording the search scope is a
  finding, not non-compliance. deliberation takes an assigned round artifact, standard a
  section inside an existing round-02 file.

Two text fixes. §4.0 listed round-1 independence among invariants "never dropped for speed"
while §11.A said "there is no enforcement beyond agent discipline" — the qualifier reconciles them.
§6 rule 4 now applies explicitly to scoping.

Applied to both COOPERATION.md copies (live deck and the embedded parley init template),
per the drift guard.

Recorded finding about §15.5 itself. Across four consensus revisions the drafter's own
disclosure went 8 → 13 → 21 → 23 of 23 material changes; every increment came from other
participants re-running the source comparison. §15.5 is not self-enforcing, and FINAL.md carries
that as an open follow-up rather than pretending otherwise.