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🤝 Offers and Agreements

Offers and Agreements are the foundational mechanisms by which Agents coordinate action, exchange value, and create shared context in the MAP.

While this section explores expressive forms capable of supporting complex, multi-party, even legally significant Agreements, many Offers in MAP will be lightweight, informal, and intuitive. A quick pledge, a mutual aid exchange, or a casual collaboration between neighbors — all of these fit comfortably in the same model.

🧘 You don’t need a treaty to water your neighbor’s tomatoes.
MAP simply gives you the grammar to coordinate trustably — whether your promise is simple or sophisticated.

What follows dives into the deeper architecture — not because coordination must be complex, but because the MAP must support trustable complexity when it matters.

📦 What is an Offer?

An Offer is a structured proposal composed of reciprocal Promises, organized by roles. It serves as the template for an Agreement — laying out who is involved, what each party promises, and under what conditions.

Each Offer defines:

  • A set of roles that participating Agents may occupy (e.g., provider, recipient, funder)
  • For each role, a set of required Promises (a.k.a., requirements) — specific commitments expected from Agents in that role
  • Aspirational Promises that express values or alignment criteria (e.g., "Fair Trade Certified")
  • Vital Capital Flow Promises — detailing the kinds of capital that will move (e.g., data, care, money, knowledge)
  • Optional constraints — timing, thresholds, or conditional triggers
  • Governance Promises — such as how disputes will be resolved, how roles may be amended, or how an agreement may be exited
  • Interaction Protocol Promises — specifying how agents will interact (e.g., using JLINC, JLINX, Beckn Protocol, Secure Scuttlebutt, or MAP-native protocols)

When an Agent accepts an Offer, they step into a role and adopt the full set of Promises associated with it.

This role-based structure allows Offers to support multi-party Agreements. For example, a learning cohort might include roles for facilitator, learner, and funder — each with distinct Promises and flows.

Offers can span diverse types of value and coordination. A Promise might track a flow of care, reputation, presence, funds, or shared data — and do so differently for each participant.

Importantly, each Agent defines the terms of their own Offers. This supports MAP’s commitment to empowered agency — enabling participants to express and exchange value on their own terms. At the same time, a shared pool of reusable Promise Types and Offer Templates (see: Promise Weaves) allows new Offers to build on proven structures.

🛰 Where Offers Are Placed

Each Offer must be extended into a specific AgentSpace — the context in which it is discoverable and interpretable.

AgentSpaces vary widely in:

  • Reach — from small private circles to global directories
  • Trust level — from intimate, high-context groups to open public spaces
  • Purpose and filtering logic — some are commons, some are marketplaces, some are ceremonial

A single Offer might be published in a high-reach, low-trust space (like the Exosphere) for visibility — while being intended for execution only within high-trust subspaces.

Agents decide where to place their Offers based on intended audience, visibility preferences, and discovery strategy.

Future tooling may support Offer propagation, adaptation, or invitation across adjacent AgentSpaces — enabling ecosystems to route Offers to the places they are most likely to be accepted.

🔁 Matching Offers to Offers

In conventional platforms, we often speak of matching “needs” to “offers.” But the MAP model is more symmetrical: every Offer includes both.

When an Agent posts an Offer into an AgentSpace, they specify:

  • Which roles they are prepared to adopt (i.e., which Promises they are making)
  • Which roles they seek others to fulfill (i.e., which Promises they expect to be met)

You can think of these as: - The requirements of the Offer — Promises you are looking for others to fulfill - The contributions or attributes of the Offer — Promises you’re committing to fulfill yourself

For example:

A Grower wants help assessing their soil’s capacity to grow heirloom tomatoes.
They publish an Offer with two roles: - Grower — promises to provide samples, location, and context - Soil Expert — expected to promise expertise, analysis, and recommendations

The Grower signs the Offer in the Grower role and publishes it into a local regenerative farming AgentSpace.

Meanwhile, other Agents may have Offers advertising “Soil Assessment” services in the Soil Expert role. When the roles and promises across these Offers align — a match can be proposed, negotiated, or auto-suggested.

🤖 The Three Phases of Offer Matching

To support this matching process, a dedicated Offer Matching mapp guides Offers through three key phases: preliminary matching, connection, and signing.

1. Preliminary Matching (Anonymous Discovery)

Offers can be placed anonymously into an AgentSpace. In this phase:

  • The Offer Matching mapp evaluates compatibility across all Offers in the space
  • It highlights:
  • Over-constrained Offers — too many requirements, resulting in zero matches
  • Under-specified Offers — too few constraints, leading to too many mismatches

For example:

“Relaxing the timing requirement or certification criteria would open up 3 more matching Offers.”

“Adding a Promise around ecological region or method used could eliminate a large number of incompatible matches.”

The goal of this phase is to help Agents arrive at a manageable candidate set — ideally 5 to 7 potential matches — while preserving privacy and agency.

No identities are revealed at this stage. Matching remains possibility-oriented, not commitment-bound.

2. Connection (Mutual Visibility and Alignment)

Once promising matches are identified, participating Agents may move into a shared exploration phase.

  • Agents reveal their identities to one another
  • Offers may be fine-tuned — small adjustments made to better align expectations or clarify edge cases
  • The goal is not full negotiation, but adaptive convergence: aligning Promises and roles just enough to lock in a shared commitment

This phase establishes the social and technical trust necessary to move forward, without rushing to finality.

3. Signing (Commitment and Activation)

Each Agent digitally signs the Offer to formally accept a specific role.

  • Offers may specify some roles as mandatory and others as optional
  • Once all mandatory roles have been signed, the Agreement is considered Accepted
  • At this point:
  • A new Agreement-Based AgentSpace is instantiated
  • All logic, interactions, and capital flows are governed by the terms of the Agreement

This phase marks the shift from “provisional possibility” to active commitment.

It also activates the Agreement’s LifeCode, access protocols, and any associated Dances or governance logic.

✍️ What is an Agreement?

An Agreement is formed when one or more Agents accept roles defined in an Offer — formally committing to fulfill the Promises associated with those roles.

Each Agreement includes:

  • A reference to the originating Offer and its terms
  • A list of participating Agents and their accepted roles
  • The governing context for all future interactions — such as service invocations, data access, and Promise fulfillment
  • Optionally, a new Agreement-Based AgentSpace for coordinating action and tracking outcomes

Agreements in MAP transcend but include the functionality of Smart Contracts.
Like Smart Contracts, they provide structured, enforceable commitments — but unlike blockchain-based contracts, they are not confined to purely software-enforceable scopes, nor do they require centralized consensus or global ledgers.
Agreements can include informal social promises, legally-binding terms, and interaction protocols — all anchored in shared consent and local sovereignty.

🧱 Three-Layered Representation: From Offer to Agreement

Both Offers and Agreements are expressed using a three-layered architecture, inspired by the Creative Commons licensing model. Just as Creative Commons defines a license through a human-readable deed, a machine-readable schema, and a legal code, MAP uses a layered approach to ensure legibility and enforceability across all domains of interaction.

  1. Human-Readable Layer
  2. A narrative or visual summary describing roles, Promises, and intentions

  3. Supports shared understanding and informed consent

  4. Machine-Readable Layer

  5. A structured Holon with formal types, roles, and thresholds

  6. Governs execution, trust, permissioning, and audits within the MAP infrastructure

  7. Legal-Form Layer (optional)

  8. A formal legal document aligned with the other layers
  9. Enables engagement with courts, insurance systems, or regulatory institutions

🧩 The three layers ensure Offers and Agreements are clear to humans, computable by systems, and actionable across jurisdictions.

🔐 Cryptographic Integrity

The entire bundle — for both Offers and Agreements — is cryptographically digested and signed by all participating Agents. This provides:

  • Immutability: the record cannot be altered without detection
  • Non-forgeability: only valid Agents could have created the signature
  • Non-repudiability: no Agent can deny their participation

Promise Weaves as the Offer to Agreement Protocol

The MAP's Promise Weaver sub-system supports a coordination protocol by which Offers can become Agreements. If you are curious how this process could work in practice, Promise Weaver may be worth a look.

But you can also safely skip this section and go directly to Vital Capital Flows.