The Life of a Commitment

The small word-set a promise lives by, from the moment work is asked for to the moment it is closed.

A body needs only a few words for this, and the fewness is the design. A way to ask. A way to answer. A word that binds. A word that says done. A word by which the receiver says it landed. And honest exits.

Commit — the word spoken at the gathering and witnessed: of the available work, I will do these pieces, by then. This is how work leaves the board and enters a hand, and there is deliberately no lighter act than this one, so that every hand on the work has given its word. Delivered — the doer's word that it is done against the conditions agreed. Kept — the receiver's word at the handoff, checked against those conditions; only the receiver can close a promise this way, and it is the act that makes the work count. Returned — the receiver finds the conditions unmet; it reopens, and the gap is examined for what it teaches. Released — let go before it is broken, in the open, with a reason. Declined — an addressed no to the asking, terminal, so the asking is free to find another hand.

A promise standing past its date with none of these said is broken — written plainly, with its why, and learned from. Nothing is ever deleted (Consciously Breaking Commitments, The gap).

It is load-bearing because these six or seven words are the entire grammar a body without a hierarchy runs on. Get them stable and a thousand strangers can plan around one another; leave them loose and every group invents its own, and no two records can be read together (Networks of Commitments, Minimum standards of interoperability).

The set is deliberately smaller than the ones other traditions use. Where several answers arrive to one ask, the receiver simply commits with one of them, and no separate act of choosing is needed. What is owed to someone after their work is an accounting entry, not an event of the record (TimeEnergy, Requests and offers).

Also called: the words a commitment lives by Stands on: Commitment · Committor · Committee · A word given is a word kept Opens onto: The states of a commitment · The Commitment Tracker · Release · Decline · Witness · Conditions of satisfaction · Consciously Breaking Commitments · Kept as a share of made · The Heartbeat In play: the table — spoken at the gathering, written the same evening Sources: Projects/the term pages/The Life of a Commitment.md (draft, unreviewed) · Making And Securing Commitments (wiki root) · Projects/The Kit 2026-09/The Commitment Tracker… (draft) · lionsberg.wiki: Making And Securing Commitments Open: The receiver's word is left open on the page itself between validated, witnessed and kept; this page carries kept, which is the word the tracker and the score both use, and names the choice as unmade. · Three state vocabularies are live across the canon at once (The states of a commitment). · The page's flat statement that the Game keeps no act of taking, awarding or claiming stood against five sibling pages; those acts were later struck, which settles it in this page's favour and leaves those siblings stranded.