Define the Open Audit Mission role

[veraxis-protocol]

What this does

Establishes this repository as the canonical public home for the OAM definition, per owner disposition of 2026-09-08 under CAT-ALIGN-001B.

Files changed: README.md — new file. Nothing else.

The definition

OAM is the examination and audit-authority workflow within Open Institutional Computation.

It governs who may examine a bounded institutional-continuity claim, what evidence is examined, how disposition/correction/replay are recorded, and whether an examination result is fit for later institutional reliance.

OAM does not create institutional authority, compile policy, establish ZTL logical warrant, or authorize exact runtime execution.

The exclusions are stated as plainly as the role, because the conflict this resolves was precisely an over-attribution.

Why this repository, and why now

The CAT-ALIGN-001B census found two published Veraxis surfaces in material conflict about OAM:

• institutional-continuity/README.md — "Standing/examination workflow where appropriate"
• Institutional-Compiler admission contract — "OAM/ZTL may constrain operational authority"

Those sit on opposite sides of the authority-planes non-collapse rule: examination and evidentiary authority on one side, causal authority over runtime execution on the other. The owner adopted the examination-side reading with explicit exclusions, and designated this repository — which held no definition at all, having been empty — as the canonical home.

The corresponding corrections are separate PRs: veraxis-protocol/institutional-continuity#2 carries the THESIS role and the reconciliation record; veraxis-protocol/Institutional-Compiler#45 records the erratum against the admission contract without editing the preregistered predecessor.

A note on how this repository was initialized

The repository had zero refs — no default branch existed, and GitHub cannot open a pull request into a base that does not exist. On owner instruction, main was seeded with a single inert commit (.gitignore containing .DS_Store, which several sibling repositories have committed accidentally) so that this definition could arrive through review rather than by direct push to a default branch.

That seed commit asserts no licence, no category statement, no claim and no definition. Everything substantive is in this PR.

Claim impact

None, and bounded by construction. The README's own STATUS section reads:

Architecture definition only.
No production implementation or readiness claim.

No implementation, maturity, adoption, benchmark or legal-effect claim is made. No runtime code is added — the repository contains no code at all.

Open follow-up, not blocking

The OAM-GATE-* identifier family in Institutional-Compiler-Review-Ledger is, per the same disposition, to be read as audit/examination gates over evidence, review, disposition, release or institutional reliance — not as evidence that OAM owns runtime authorization. Historical identifiers are deliberately not renamed.

• Base SHA: 5eb00f513d59af7e62d23f0bf73e3d6984d4736f
• Head SHA: 3627a916f58e83dbd6962c4842752a5985470ff4

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