No governance claim without a witness.
A witness is an auditable reference that makes a claim, decision, object, evidence item, authority or time boundary reviewable.
| Document type | Public Canon Reference |
|---|---|
| Status | ACTIVE PUBLIC SPECIFICATION |
| Version | v16.3 |
| Last revised | 2026-09-19 |
| Maintainer | SnapOS Foundation / Marko Chalupa |
| Canonical URI | https://snapos.org/en/governance-evidence.html |
| Cite as | SnapOS.org, Governance Evidence, v16.3, accessed YYYY-MM-DD. |
In SnapOS, a witness is not a rhetorical citation. It is the minimal audit reference that allows a claim to be checked, reopened and bounded.
Source Witness SNAP-WIT-SOURCE
Where did the claim or object come from?
Object Witness SNAP-WIT-OBJECT
Which document, workflow, model or artefact was actually audited?
Evidence Witness SNAP-WIT-EVIDENCE
Which evidence supports which claim, and where does it stop?
Temporal Witness SNAP-WIT-TEMPORAL
At what date, version and snapshot is the finding valid?
Authority Witness SNAP-WIT-AUTHORITY
Who was documented as entitled to approve, review, challenge, override or decide — for this specific case, not organizational rank in general.
Reviewer Witness SNAP-WIT-REVIEWER
Who produced or reviewed the output, and under what status?
These six witnesses form the public core set for general governance evidence. The full SnapOS Conformance Schema also includes two more, used where decision reliance or context transfer is involved:
Decision Witness SNAP-WIT-DECISION
The affected decision or reliance act, where the output is used to decide something.
Transfer Witness SNAP-WIT-TRANSFER
Context or regime transfer of the claim, where a finding moves beyond its original evidence boundary.
Governance without witnesses becomes narrative. SnapOS converts governance claims into bounded, reviewable and reopenable audit objects.
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