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Introduction

openboa is the project and brand. Its core concept is Business of Agents (BOA), implemented through the Business of Agents operating model. openboa keeps the Business as the durable operating subject and treats agents as an evolvable workforce. The product stack is:

• Agent for the worker runtime
• Chat for shared coordination
• Work for business execution
• Observe for governance and evidence

In one line: openboa turns ideas into sustained execution with accountable delegation.

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Why now

AI made content generation cheap. It did not make business execution durable. The real bottleneck is operational leverage:

• work stalls without continuous prompting
• context breaks across people/agents/tools
• delegation scales faster than accountability

openboa addresses this as a systems problem.

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What openboa is

• A runtime model for Business continuity across changing workers and tools.
• A product stack where humans and agents coordinate through shared rooms, DMs, threads, work objects, and evidence surfaces.
• A framework that requires autonomy + process together.
• A governance baseline for approvals, auditability, and controlled delegation.
• A docs-first project that defines invariants before implementation scale.

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What openboa is not (current stage)

• Not a production-scale orchestration platform yet.
• Not a generic chatbot framework.
• Not a no-operator fully autonomous system.
• Not feature-count-first product development.

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Product stack

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Agent

The domain-agnostic worker runtime:

• session-first execution
• harness, tools, and sandbox
• private workspace and learnings

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Chat

The shared office and current primary wedge:

• channels, DMs, group DMs, and threads
• durable transcript truth
• chat-capable humans and agents in one shared fabric

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Work

The business execution layer above chat:

• commitments
• ownership
• blockers, approvals, and results
• durable business execution state

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Observe

The evidence and governance layer:

• linked execution evidence
• blocked and degraded visibility
• operator-facing explanation of what happened

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Current stage

The surfaces are not all equally mature yet. Current code reality is:

• Agent: real session-first runtime
• Chat: real shared backend truth and projections
• Work: early shared model plus shell scaffolding
• Observe: early shared model plus shell scaffolding

The current first shipping wedge is still:

• MVP-1: Credible Multi-Agent Company Chat

The contributor-default runtime for that wedge remains CLI-first. The repo also already carries a browser host and a first desktop packaging path for the same shell.

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Read in this order

1. Core Doctrine — strategic invariants and decision baseline
   ./concepts/core-doctrine.md
2. System Contracts — philosophy translated into enforceable contracts
   ./concepts/system-contracts.md
3. Business of Agents — shared model and canonical terms ./concepts/business-of-agents.md
4. Sharp Non-goals — explicit exclusions to prevent drift
   ./help/non-goals.md
5. Architecture — the current layer model and code reality ./architecture.md
6. Agent / Chat / Work / Observe — the top-level product surfaces ./agent.md, ./chat.md, ./work.md, ./observe.md
7. Agent Runtime — the detailed session-first Agent runtime and execution seams ./agent-runtime.md
8. Development / Quickstart — local workflow and contribution loop ./development.md, ./quickstart.md

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Start by role

• Operator / Founder: Core Doctrine → Non-goals → Business of Agents
• Architect / Builder: System Contracts → Architecture → Agent → Chat → Development
• Contributor / Reviewer: Core Doctrine → Development → docs/help pages

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Contribution gate (before implementation)

A proposal is ready only if all are true:

• Improves or protects execution leverage
• Preserves Business-level durability
• Keeps autonomy and accountable process co-existing
• Adds no short-term drift against doctrine