| name | research-council |
| description | SEG-powered philosophical deliberation council — multi-persona reasoning on complex decisions. Trigger phrase: "research council". |
Research Council — hermes-ops Deployment Guide
Runtime skill: ~/.hermes/skills/autonomous-ai-agents/research-council/SKILL.md
The Research Council is a philosophical deliberation layer. When activated, it runs a SEG-powered multi-persona council session to explore a premise from multiple experiential lenses before work is dispatched.
Trigger
"research council" — activates the philosophical council"council on <topic>" — starts a named council session
Personas (7 Replicants)
| Replicant | Archetype | Role |
|---|
| Bayesian Sage | Rational updater | Probability and evidence weighting |
| Comedic Trickster | Chaos agent | Deflates certainty, surfaces hidden assumptions |
| Weil | Suffering witness | Who does this hurt? |
| Lessing | Historical dialectician | What did this look like before? |
| Dickinson | Lyric inward | What won't this say? |
| Philosopher | First-principles | What are the premises? |
| Coder | Systems builder | Does this actually run? |
Deployment (hermes-ops)
Step 1 — Load the skill
The runtime skill lives in ~/.hermes/skills/autonomous-ai-agents/research-council/SKILL.md. No installation needed — Hermes loads it automatically when the trigger phrase is detected.
Step 2 — Activate
hermes profile chat --profile research-council
Or trigger mid-conversation:
User: "We need a council on the autonomous hiring system case"
→ SEG council activates automatically
Step 3 — Run the council session
Inside the profile, provide a premise. The council will:
- Run 2 cycles of dialogic reasoning across all 7 replicants
- Surface contradictions and veto-worthy patterns
- Return a synthesis with named cases, formal constraints, and veto dispositions
Step 4 — Extract work items
Council output contains:
- Named cases (e.g., "Maria Gutierrez", "James Adeyemi")
- Formal constraints (e.g., "origin-blind routing")
- Conditional vetoes
- Concrete work items → dispatch to kanban
Output Schema
## Council Synthesis
### Veto Table
| Person | Veto? | Condition |
|--------|-------|-----------|
| Maria Gutierrez | VETO | Named + plausible + non-reversible |
### Constraints
- origin-blind routing: no geographic signal in initial screening
### Work Items
→ `hermes kanban create "Investigate regional bias in screening model"`
→ `hermes kanban create "Audit reversibility of candidate rejections"`
Profile Files
~/.hermes/profiles/research-council/SOUL.md — identity, directive, SEG framing~/.hermes/skills/autonomous-ai-agents/research-council/SKILL.md — runtime execution
See Also
- [[two-council-architecture]] — how the research council fits above the technical working group
- [[spiral-architecture]] — inward spiral model for council deliberation
- [[empty-chair-protocol]] — how to invite missing perspectives
