Ratify a project charter

Ratify a project charter

A charter is the contract between you and the agentic team. Before any ATP goal is dispatched, a charter must be ratified and stored as a durable charter_ratification record in eden-memory. This tutorial covers editing the template, running the ratification command, and inspecting the stored record.

Prerequisites

• ATP global primitives installed (see the first team goal tutorial).
• A project with .claude/agentic-team-charter.md (created by ./install.sh --local or copied manually).
• eden-memory installed and configured.

Step 1 — Open the charter template

The project-local charter lives at:

.claude/agentic-team-charter.md

If it does not exist, copy it from the package templates:

mkdir -p .claude
cp /path/to/eden-releases/agentic-team-protocol/templates/agentic-team-charter.md .claude/agentic-team-charter.md

Step 2 — Replace every placeholder

Edit the file and fill in each section:

Section	What to write
Identity	Project name, path, and one-line purpose.
Mission	A single sentence describing what success looks like.
Boundaries	Hard guardrails: no destructive live operations, no secrets in memory, Runtime gated unless authorised.
Roles/seats	Active roles and whether Runtime is gated.
Decision rights	Who decides routing, implementation, verdicts, live ops, and user overrides.
Escalation paths	Chain from owning role to Dispatcher, chair, and founders.
Branch discipline	Feature-branch rules, merge-commit style, and Runtime authority.
Interfaces	eden-memory path, global skill path, project-local skill override.
Runbooks owned	Files the Archivist should keep up to date.
Status cadence	How often to run /team-status.
Retirement condition	How to stop using ATP for this project.

Common guardrails to keep:

• Do not perform destructive actions on external or live systems without explicit authorisation.
• Secrets, tokens, and credentials must never be stored in eden-memory or conversation logs.
• Runtime is gated unless explicitly authorised by this charter.

Step 3 — Verify the active roles match

Open .claude/agentic-team-config.yaml and confirm the roles listed there are the same roles marked active in the charter. Mismatches cause /team-charter to report no-proceed.

Example active set:

active_roles:
  - dispatcher
  - researcher
  - builder
  - verifier
  - archivist

Step 4 — Run /team-charter

In Claude Code, run:

/team-charter

The command:

1. Resolves the charter path (project-local first, then global fallback).
2. Computes a SHA-256 hash of the file content.
3. Checks for placeholders and role mismatches.
4. Stores a charter_ratification record in eden-memory.
5. Reports whether the team may proceed.

Expected output:

Charter path: .claude/agentic-team-charter.md
Version: 9f86d081884c7d65
Record ID: <uuid>
Status: proceed

Step 5 — Inspect the ratification record

Retrieve the record with the eden-memory CLI:

eden-memory search \
  --agent-id claude-code-cli \
  --user-id "$(id -un)" \
  --keywords "charter_ratification" \
  --limit 10

Each ratification record contains metadata like:

{
  "kind": "charter_ratification",
  "stage": "charter_ratification",
  "goal_id": "charter-ratification",
  "owner_role": "archivist"
}

The record content also stores the charter version, the rater, and the ratification timestamp.

Step 6 — Amend and re-ratify

When you change the charter, re-run /team-charter. The new version hash is stored as a separate ratification record. The Archivist should keep an amendment log linking the old and new versions.

Expected output after re-ratification:

Charter path: .claude/agentic-team-charter.md
Version: 7d865e959b246691 (was 9f86d081884c7d65)
Record ID: <new-uuid>
Status: proceed

Expected final state

• .claude/agentic-team-charter.md contains no placeholders.
• .claude/agentic-team-config.yaml lists the same active roles as the charter.
• eden-memory contains at least one charter_ratification record with a non-zero version hash.

Next steps

• Read the charter anatomy concept page for a deeper explanation of each section.
• Learn the default global charter in the default charter reference.
• Run your first goal with /team after ratification succeeds.