CEREMONY.md — the Portable Proof-of-Understanding Ceremony

The 8-section spec proposed in the LAN-ceremony chronicle (2026-06-28, §5),
filled. This is the rite that opens the course and re-opens every venue.

1 · Premise & myth

A shared local mage — an air-gapped model in a flight case — sits on the
table. The room co-holds it: a witness the group bears together, like a bowl
too wide for one pair of hands (C10, C11). The ceremony's output is not a
deployment; it is proof of understanding — shared comprehension made
legible as a seal (C9). The myth the room steps into is the babblefish: one
truth, many tongues, and the joy of hearing it speak in each (C1–C3).

2 · The trust/sync rite

The human sequence, in order — each rung consent-gated, understanding is what
climbs (LAN §4¾):

1. Arrive — the room assembles; the steward of the week uncrates the mage.
2. Join the local net — the carried network (§3), never the venue's Wi-Fi
   as a dependency.
3. Resolve the mage's one good name — every client, identically (C24, C25).
   The room says the name together; thirteen of fourteen resolving is a
   failure state, not a quorum.
4. Offer, don't probe — each participant offers their address to the
   roster (C16). Nobody is scanned.
5. Read the gateway with your own agency — the front-door page carries the
   rite; understanding-as-key begins at the moment of reading (C5).
6. First shared exchange — each participant expresses, in their own words,
   what they understood; the expression is admitted through the consent gate
   and becomes both key and food (C7).
7. The seal — when every participant is synced and expressed, the group
   seals: one artefact that says this room reached the shared mind together
   (C9). The seal is logged; the trust artefact (§4 below) opens the cookie
   jar (C8).

3 · The portable substrate

What physically travels (C14):

• the mage machine — the local LLM host (mage/MACHINE_SETUP.md);
• the carried naming layer — our own resolver answering the one good
  name deterministically (C25); venue mDNS is never load-bearing;
• participant clients — mixed PC/Mac laptops; must Just Work against the
  carried layer;
• the flight-case extras — cables, a small switch/AP if the venue's
  network is hostile (client isolation = reach for the overlay), the steward's
  key.

4 · The naming contract

• ONE good name per mage instance; whoever holds the mage names it; there is
  no canonical string (C24). Everything else is a path under the name
  (/mage, /roster, /gateway), never a second name.
• Never .localhost for a shared name (RFC 6761 — C27).
• The front door serves a catch-all so near-misses degrade soft (C28).
• The trust artefact issued on sealing is a myTerms (IEEE 7012) agreement
  — bilateral, First Person ↔ workshop-holder; the mage and every agent are
  fabric, not parties (C17–C19). Registers in workshop/consent/.

5 · Failure-mode playbook

Seeded from the canonical live case ("the name that worked in the browser"):

6 · Pre-flight checklist

Run on arrival, before participants enter (2 minutes): see
workshop/PREFLIGHT.md — resolution from a clean resolver on two clients,
catch-all answering, roster empty, steward's --verify green.

7 · Ceremony script (run-of-show)

1. Steward's opening: last week's fold read aloud; corpus_pack --verify
   green in front of the room (the chain is public to itself).
2. The rite of §2, walked.
3. The week's babblefish round: entries, renderings, the blind gate
   (workshop/CURRICULUM.md carries the session arc).
4. Steward's fold: the week's consented expressions eaten; new pack hash
   logged and read aloud.
5. Handover: next week's steward takes the key.

8 · Canon binding

• Every session ends with a chronicle draft (the harness's Chronicle seat, or
  the steward's hand) filed in chronicles/.
• Outputs that should travel are spooled (fedwiki/export_page.mjs) and walk
  the Oasis loop home (fedwiki/OASIS_LOOP.md) — fork → cast → transmit,
  with the outward legs at the First Person's door (T6).
• The course's lineage lands in the City's canon the way the first oasis did:
  as a named, real link — never an abstract placeholder.

Assets

Source: workshop/CEREMONY.md

upstream: github.com/mitchuski/hh_workshop · the repo is the source of truth; this page is a projection that records its origin · author: Mitchell Travers · (⚔️⊥⿻⊥🧙)😊

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