mini-edict

Mini Edict

English | Chinese

Mini Edict implements the Three Departments and Six Ministries as an executable governance protocol. Everything specific to the example lives in this directory. OpenCollab provides agent sessions and model access. It also handles concurrency, token budgets, tracing, and persistence.

task
  -> Zhongshu Secretariat drafts
  -> Menxia Chancellery approves or vetoes
       -> veto: Zhongshu revises, at most two times
       -> approve: Shangshu selects relevant ministries
            -> selected ministries execute in parallel
  -> Shangshu produces an evidence-bearing memorial
  -> Menxia performs the final audit
       -> approved result or blocked result

The one-shot workflow enforces this separation in Python control flow. Execution cannot start before Menxia approval. A veto returns concrete findings to Zhongshu. Shangshu assigns distinct work and acceptance criteria only to ministries relevant to the task. The final audit checks the memorial against the approved proposal and assigned work. It also checks the ministry reports and their evidence.

Talk to Zhongshu

Start OpenCollab with the example's team file.

uv run opencollab \
  --team-config examples/mini-edict/team.yaml \
  --workspace .

The persistent root session is Zhongshu. It answers ordinary questions itself. Ask for a concrete deliverable, or say convene the court, and Zhongshu drafts a proposal, obtains Menxia approval, sends the approved work to Shangshu, and returns the audited memorial. Shangshu selects and spawns the relevant ministries through OpenCollab's normal team scheduler. The team topology prevents Zhongshu from dispatching directly to a ministry and gives Menxia no dispatch path. Role instructions guide the review order in this conversational mode.

Run one decree

The same institution can run as a one-shot workflow with fixed approval gates.

OPENCOLLAB_WORKFLOWS_DIR=examples/mini-edict/workflows \
  uv run opencollab workflow run three-departments-six-ministries \
  --concurrency 6 \
  --args '{"task":"Design a six-month open-source community growth plan."}'

This command prints each institutional phase. Its return value contains the proposal, review history, dispatch decision, selected ministry reports, final memorial, audit, and token use.

Design references

The workflow adapts Edict's mandatory Menxia review and dynamic Shangshu routing. It also uses Agent-Team as a reference for skill packaging and the bounded revision loop. The workflow dispatches only the ministries needed for the task and carries their evidence into the final audit. The implementation uses OpenCollab's workflow API.

Implementation

The protocol lives in team.yaml and one workflow module, together totaling 239 lines. Edit role mandates in team.yaml and stage order in the workflow. OpenCollab supplies the shared runtime.