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Primary responsibility

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Sources

Docs: Publishing responsibility Web App: Open Publish or People for the current Parable to inspect its responsibilities and the explanation on each available action. Primary is the customer-facing name for the accountable responsibility on one Parable. The Primary is answerable for the outcome and for decisions that require accountable review. Primary can be one person, a Role, or a whole Workspace. When a Role or Workspace holds it, everyone in that group is accountable together, and the seat still holds one answer: that group.

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Access and responsibility are separate

The applicable checks must hold before a protected action runs:
  1. The person can use the relevant Workspace or Admin surface.
  2. Their current responsibility on this Parable permits the action.
  3. Current Policies permit any Policy-controlled action. Primary does not bypass a denied Policy.
Provider Policies apply to the Primary like anyone their roles name: being Primary on a Parable reads no more of a Provider table than the Primary’s roles allow. Primary does not grant Workspace membership, reveal a protected Parable, or make someone an administrator. Likewise, an administrator is not automatically Primary on a Parable built in their Workspace: its creator is. A Parable deployed to a Workspace is the exception, described below. People with Parable view access and a responsibility on the Parable can find and open it from the Workspace directory. They do not need authoring or Ponder permissions just to read it.

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What Primary should do

  • keep the intended outcome and audience clear;
  • ensure a responsible publisher or author is assigned;
  • review consequential, irreversible, or high-blast-radius decisions, such as raising the budget of a Pipeline paused at its caps, which only Primary may do and only with the budget override permission;
  • confirm that Proofs support the result; and
  • update responsibility when ownership genuinely changes.
If an accountable action is disabled, read its explanation. Confirm the selected Workspace, current Parable, Patch state, surface permission, and responsibility. Changing Persona or selecting a Power does not change any of those gates.

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Primary on a deployed Parable

When Parable staff deploy a Parable to a Workspace, that Workspace’s copy gets two responsibilities:
  • every member of the Workspace holds Pinging, so they can read the Parable and comment on it; and
  • the Workspace’s administrators hold Primary, through the Workspace Administrator Role.
Primary is what lets an administrator pull a Delivery into review, publish it, retry a failed Delivery, and assign responsibilities to other people. Without it nobody in the receiving Workspace could act on what was deployed. The Role holds the seat, not a named person, so it follows whoever administers the Workspace now. An administrator can transfer Primary to a person or another Role. A later deployment keeps that choice. Revoking a deployment removes both responsibilities. A Primary the Workspace assigned to a named person or another Role stays. Deploying to the Workspace again restores Pinging for every member, and restores Primary to the administrators when nobody else holds it.

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Transfer Primary

An existing Primary can transfer the responsibility to another person, Role, or Workspace in Collaboration → Participants. The replacement is checked against the responsibilities held before the change. Publishing participants can manage equal or lower permissions, but cannot assign themselves Primary or replace the current Primary group.

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Choose how you are collaborating now

Primary is a standing responsibility, not a temporary mode. A Primary person can choose Publishing, Pinging, or Peeking for the work they are doing now and keeps the accountable boundary in every mode. Choosing a narrower mode hides actions; it never grants a new one.