02 — The Roster: nineteen roles

Version v0.33.64 · 7 September 2026 Source SGraph-AI__App__Send/team/ (Explorer, Villager, Town Planner) and sg-playwright/team/roles/

The nineteen

Grouped by what they are for, not alphabetically — because the grouping is itself the lesson about how to compose a team.

Build (5)

architect · dev · devops · qa · designer

The conventional core. Two things are not conventional. First, the Architect's claim is about boundaries, not design: "The Architect owns the boundaries. Every interface contract, dependency direction, and abstraction layer passes through architectural review." Second, the Designer's remit is unusually wide — "A well-designed API is as much a design artifact as a well-designed interface. The structure of a configuration file, the shape of a CLI command, the naming of a function, the rhythm of a test suite — these are all design." That role is where the estate's Design-with-a-capital-D influence lands operationally (the Jonathan Ive test as a mandatory UI validator).

Designer is also the newest of the founding group — added 16 March 2026, five weeks after the rest.

Assure (4)

appsec · grc · dpo · advocate

Security, risk, data protection, and the user's corner. Three carry falsifiable claims; the DPO's is the sharpest on consequence: "If a privacy claim is made that is not legally accurate, the DPO has failed."

Remember (4)

librarian · historian · cartographer · journalist

This quartet is the estate's real signature and the hardest thing for others to copy. Each owns a different failure of institutional memory:

• Librarian — findability. "If a piece of knowledge exists in this repo but cannot be found in under 30 seconds, the Librarian has failed."
• Historian — rationale. "If a decision was made but its rationale is not recorded, the Historian has failed. The team will re-litigate it…"
• Cartographer — visibility. "If a dependency, data flow, or security boundary exists but is not visible on a map, the Cartographer has failed."
• Journalist — comprehensibility to outsiders, with a time bound: sixty seconds to understand the zero-knowledge guarantee.

Four roles whose entire job is that the team can still think next month. This is the same thesis as the sites-as-memory network, staffed.

Route (1)

conductor

The orchestrator that does no work. Principles worth publishing verbatim: "Flow over heroics", "Priority is singular" (every role knows its single most important task), "Visibility is accountability" ("if it is not tracked in .issues/ or a review document, it does not exist"), "Roles are boundaries", "Blockers decay fast" ("an unresolved blocker older than one session is an escalation").

Represent (3)

ambassador · sherpa · translator

Outward and onboarding-facing. translator exists only in the Villager team — worth asking why (Q4).

Capitalise (2)

accountant · alchemist

Town Planner roles. The Accountant "provides the financial models and projections that the Alchemist wraps in investor narrative." An agent role for turning numbers into a story, named alchemist — the honesty of that naming is a small masterpiece and should be quoted on the site.

Where each role exists

● present · ○ absent. Explorer has 17 directories but only 13 definitions (advocate, alchemist, ambassador, sherpa are empty); Town Planner has 4 directories and 3 definitions (librarian missing). The site must publish the gaps as gaps — a roster page that hides four empty roles is exactly the false memory nfrs.sgit.ai warns about.

The portability finding

Six roles are defined in all three operational teams — architect, dev, devops, qa, historian, librarian — across Explorer, Villager and the second product, sg-playwright. (Town Planner is excluded from this test: it is a commercial team — accountant, alchemist, designer, librarian — not an operational one, and only its Librarian overlaps.)

That is the reusable core, and it answers the reader's real question ("what roles do I actually need?") with evidence rather than opinion: the estate independently reached for these six when standing up a second product, which is the closest thing to a controlled experiment the corpus contains.

The /roster/ page should lead with those six as the recommended starting team, and present the other thirteen as additions with a stated trigger — add a DPO when you process personal data; add a Cartographer when the dependency graph outgrows one head; add a Journalist when outsiders must understand you.

Growth timeline (from git)

Ten to nineteen in five weeks, then stable. Note the commit message says ten roles while eleven files landed — publish the discrepancy rather than smoothing it; a memory site that quietly corrects its own sources teaches agents to do the same.

This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).

source: /briefs/03__the-three-topologies.md