Check that the instrument stays internally whole

[NetworkTheoryAppliedResearchInstitute]

The same three layers now on Janus, adapted to what a governing instrument actually risks — plus a suite, which this repo had none of.

The risk being addressed

P1-001 carries 104 numbered provisions and 199 internal cross references, all maintained by hand. Nothing about that is self-checking. Renumber a provision and every reference to it keeps pointing at a number that now means something else, or nothing at all — and the breakage stays invisible until a reader follows one. For a governing instrument that is the worst possible moment to find out.

It starts green

python bylaws-conformance-suite.py

[PASS] B1 preamble, sixteen articles in order, appendix
[PASS] B2 provisions numbered 1..n inside each article -- 104 provisions across 16 articles
[PASS] B3 every section cross reference resolves -- 199 references, 77 distinct, all resolve
[PASS] B4 every lettered sub-item reference resolves -- 11 sub-item references, all resolve
[PASS] B5 header version agrees with the filename -- version 1.0
[PASS] B6 no personal data beyond the organizational footer
[PASS] B7 translations present beside the instrument -- 7 translations present
[PASS] B8 prior instruments preserved -- 10 prior instruments archived

RESULT: all checks PASS   (exit 0)

The instrument is clean today. That is the argument for adding this now rather than after something breaks — it locks in integrity that already exists instead of ratifying drift.

It fails when it should

A suite that cannot fail is worthless, so I tested it against deliberately broken copies:

Injected fault	Caught by	Exit
Provision 9.10 renumbered to 9.99	B2	1
An article heading renamed	B1	1
Sub-item 9.10(d) relettered	B4	1
Header version drifted from filename	B5	1
A personal email address introduced	B6	1

What's here

File	Role
bylaws-conformance-suite.py	Eight structural checks, stdlib only
.github/workflows/conformance.yml	Runs it on every PR and on pushes to main
.githooks/pre-push	Same check locally, before anything reaches the remote
CONTRIBUTING.md	Sign-off rules; what the suite does and does not constrain
.gitattributes	Pins hook, workflow and suite to LF

Same two deliberate choices as Janus: no paths: filter, because this is meant to become a required status check and a required check that never runs blocks a PR forever; and the hook is a convenience, not a gate — hooks aren't distributed with a repository and --no-verify skips them. The PR check is what holds.

What it explicitly does not do

It checks that the instrument is internally whole. It does not check that a provision is wise, lawful, or consistent with the architecture — those bind a reader, not a parser.

Specifically, there is no invariant registry yet. The JFA suite's real power is binding prose to registered invariants with stable IDs, so the document and the registry cannot drift apart without a check failing. The equivalent here would bind provisions to the architecture's lines — §9.10(a) to the privacy floor of line 7, §1.4(a) to stewardship of the document. That requires deciding which provisions are load bearing, which is a governance judgment rather than a mechanical one, and is left for a later change. CONTRIBUTING.md says so in as many words so the omission is on the record rather than looking like an oversight.

Merge order

The required status check is not in this PR. Adding it now would block #1 (the relicensing PR), which has no workflow in its branch and would wait forever on a check that cannot report.

Merge this → the workflow lands on main → then the check becomes required, via a repo-level ruleset rather than Org Baseline - Protect main, which is shared across NTARI-RAND.

Worth noting main here has no required_status_checks rule at all today, so a red DCO wouldn't stop a merge either.

One note on #1

I deliberately did not add a licensing check. LICENSE is currently AGPL-3.0 and #1 relicenses the instrument to CC BY-SA 4.0 — a check written now would encode a fact that's about to change. Once #1 lands, a check pinning the specification license is a two-line addition and worth making.