Require Gap, Work, and Progress Recognition in Aspirations

Every Aspiration body contains three paired sections that together make the directional claim answerable. Current Gap gives an honest account of where the project stands relative to the target — what is missing, incomplete, untested, or misaligned, named as concrete shortfalls. Work It Asks describes the moves the project can actually take given its current resources and practices, not a wish list contingent on circumstances the project does not control. Progress Recognition names observable markers by which movement toward the target would be seen — specific enough that a contributor or later reviewer can assess progress. All three are required; each alone is insufficient.

Why

The commitment distinguishes Aspiration from Conviction and from wishful thinking through three paired accountability dimensions. A Conviction claims the stance is currently maintained; an Aspiration claims the project works toward a target not yet achieved. The three sections express that distinction from three sides: Gap says where the project is now; Work says what the project will do; Progress Recognition says what movement would look like. Each accountability dimension — state, action, observable progress — would be missing if any section were dropped.

The three sections bundle because each is incomplete without the others. Gap without Work is passive reporting: the project acknowledges where it stands but commits to no action. Work without Progress Recognition is activity without accountability: the project moves without being able to assess whether the movement is toward the target. Progress Recognition without Gap and Work has nothing to measure against: markers become rhetorical, detached from both current-state baseline and the project-driven moves that would produce progress. The three reinforce each other into a now-and-later structure a reader can check.

Each section targets a distinct failure mode:

Together, the three sections turn the Aspiration into a node the project can be held to — answerable at the present state, answerable at the action layer, and answerable for observable progress toward the target.

Observable, concrete, and project-grounded: all three sections share these dispositions. Gap names concrete shortfalls, not abstract difficulty claims. Work names moves within current resources, not contingent hopes. Markers name observable movement, not rhetorical progress. The triad enforces specificity at every layer of the Aspiration's accountability.

Alternatives Considered

Pure directional claims without any accountability sections. Let Aspirations record a target and the rationale for pursuing it, without requiring Gap, Work, or Progress Recognition. Rejected because unbound directional claims are indistinguishable from Convictions-mislabeled or from inspirational rhetoric. The form's distinguishing property — progress accountability — lives in the three sections; without them, the Aspiration is a shape rather than a commitment.

Optional sections. Keep the three sections but make each author-discretionary. Rejected because optional-at-discretion sections are typically absent under time pressure. The Aspiration form's accountability property would live only in the strongest Aspirations; the Requirement produces the accountability across the corpus, not just in the author's best efforts.

Require only Gap and Markers; let Work live elsewhere. Keep the current-state and progress-observable requirements but push work content into downstream Decisions. Rejected because splitting Work from Gap and Markers breaks the accountability triad. A reader wanting to assess whether an Aspiration is being pursued would have to find every downstream Decision that claims to advance the target and reassemble the work picture. The Aspiration body is the right place to give the full accountability picture in one location.

Require Work and Markers; treat Gap as implied. Let Work's concrete moves and Markers' observable progress carry the accountability without an explicit Gap section. Rejected because Gap is the diagnostic against Conviction mislabel — without it, a Conviction with Work-like content and Markers-like content could be mislabeled as Aspiration. The Gap is what surfaces the misclassification at the authoring moment.

Allow Markers to be measurable metrics only. Require Progress Recognition to be quantified rather than observable. Rejected because quantification is one way to make a marker observable, not the only way. Many meaningful markers are qualitative — a specific capability demonstrated in a specific context, an external party adopting one of the project's conventions. The commitment targets observability, which admits qualitative markers alongside quantitative ones.

What Would Change It

The commitment bundles three sections; the revisit conditions converge.

Aspirations prove so early-stage that naming gaps or markers feels premature. If a pattern emerges where Aspirations are seeded at a scale where the work producing concrete-shortfall visibility has not yet been attempted — where the author genuinely cannot yet distinguish missing from unexplored — the rule would produce placeholder content. The revisit would soften each section to "concrete when the project's work has surfaced the content; early-stage Aspirations MAY note the scale issue explicitly." The triad structure would remain; the specificity requirement would relax.

The realistic/wish distinction proves too hard to write in Work. If Aspirations' honest Work sections genuinely cannot separate project-driven moves from externally-contingent ones — where the work is so entangled that the distinction produces forced categorization — the Work requirement would produce artificial partitions. The revisit would soften to "Work SHOULD distinguish grounded moves from externally-contingent ones when the distinction is separable; an Aspiration whose work is genuinely entangled MAY carry the work as prose with explicit entanglement noted."

Progress markers prove impossible to name for genuinely open-ended targets. If Aspirations have honest targets and honest Gap content but cannot name markers without narrowing the direction dishonestly, the rule would force markers that don't fit. The revisit would soften to "markers SHOULD be observable when the target admits observable markers; an Aspiration whose target is genuinely open-ended MAY carry an explicit 'no specific progress markers yet identifiable' note with reasoning."

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