define-governance

Part of the ACED plugin — see that page for install instructions.

Trigger: “create a governance”, “write governance rules”, “define standards”, “add criteria for”, “make a reference skill”, “create a rule set for agents to follow”

Creates or improves a governance file — a reference-only skill that encodes criteria, standards, or workflow rules other skills or agents load on demand. Governance files never auto-trigger from user input.

Governance vs. workflow skill

	Governance	Workflow skill
Purpose	Criteria, standards, rules the agent enforces	Steps the agent executes
Triggered by	Explicit load	User situation matching description:
Body style	Normative rules, checklists, rubrics	Numbered steps, decision logic

If the content is what to enforce, it’s a governance file; if it’s how to do something, route to define-skill instead.

What it does

1. Determines placement (user-global, project, or inside a plugin).
2. Gathers name, topic, consumers, and content type (rubric, constraint set, checklist, decision table, or mixed).
3. Drafts the file with description: "By name only", user-invocable: false, and metadata: type: governance — no ## Why/## Rationale section, atomic and independently falsifiable rules.
4. Creates symlinks per targeted runtime.
5. Runs quality checks (description carries no text beyond the marker, no rationale prose, Apply when: scope line) and fixes CRITICAL/HIGH failures before presenting the file.

Next step

Run sdd:start-mission to spec and eval the governance file; the conductor resolves the ACED roles automatically.