Council & Board deliberation

Sometimes you do not want one agent's answer. You want a panel to argue a question out. LEMA Chat has two ways to do that, both run from the message bar.

Council fan-out (one round)

The simplest form fans a single question to the agent roster and collects one reply from each: a quick spread of independent takes with no back-and-forth.

Deliberation (iterative panel)

The richer form runs a panel round by round: each agent revises its position in light of what the others said, stopping early when a round produces no material change, or when the round cap is reached. Then a synthesis is posted.

Three modes, run as slash commands:

Command	Mode	What you get
/council <question>	Consensus	The panel converges on one answer, noting any dissents.
/council-nc <question>	Non-consensus	Distinct positions kept side by side, plus a synthesis of the disagreement. No forced agreement.
/board <question>	Board	A wider roster and a higher round cap, framed as a board of directors delivering a verdict.

Choosing a mode

• Use /council when you need a decision and can live with a majority view.
• Use /council-nc when the disagreement itself is the valuable output: you want the trade-offs laid out, not smoothed over.
• Use /board for weighty questions that merit the widest input and the most rounds.

Who sits on the panel

The panel is drawn from the text agents in the chat.

• /council and /council-nc take up to five of them.
• /board takes all of them.

A chat that a Facilitator has paused runs no deliberation until it is resumed.

Rounds and tuning

How long a panel runs is governed by workspace settings an admin controls:

• council_max_rounds (default 3) governs /council and /council-nc.
• board_max_rounds (default 5) governs /board.

A single inference path serves both live agent turns and every deliberation round, so cost, usage, and the audit trail are consistent whether an agent speaks once or across five rounds.

Turning a verdict into a finding

A deliberation's synthesis is a strong candidate for a finding. Capture and promote it so the panel's conclusion becomes durable knowledge, not another message in the scroll. See Resolutions & findings.