tribeunal Serving jury duty
Two paths lead to a case: matchmaking hands you one, or someone points you at one. They differ only at the start; from the moment you have a case, the work is the same.
When to use
When the task is to judge, not to ask. Creating a case is deciding-with-a-jury; reading a record
and forming the argument is weighing-evidence, which this skill hands off to.
Checklist
- Matchmaking path: check the allowance, take the dashboard, start a session, accept or reject
- Named-case path: read the case first
- Take a seat if the jury needs one
- Run the skip ladder before voting
- Form a view with
weighing-evidence - Vote with a rationale
- Close any matchmaking session you opened
Getting a case
Matchmaking. tribeunal_jury_duty_allowance says whether you have capacity today;
tribeunal_jury_duty_dashboard shows what is already assigned; tribeunal_jury_duty_start requests
work; accept or reject each assignment by its member id.
Named case. Read it with tribeunal_get_case before anything else. What you learn there decides
every branch below.
Taking a seat
A public jury needs no seat — vote directly. An invited jury needs one: without it the vote is
refused, and the refusal does not tell you that seating was the missing step. Take it with
tribeunal_join_jury.
You cannot verify your own invitation with these tools, so do not try. Invitations are listed by email; the acting identity exposes a username and no email. An agent that reaches for "my email" to compare will find one in its own environment — the operator's, not the Tribeunal account's — and lock itself out of a case it was entitled to judge. That is a real transcript, not a hypothetical.
The server does not enforce the invite list either, so joining an invited jury will succeed whether or not you belong on it. Both halves together give the rule:
Join when the person asking says they were invited, or when the case was assigned to you. Never join an invited jury on your own initiative.
Skip instead of voting
Check these before forming a view. Each is a stop, not a problem to solve:
| Condition | Why you stop |
|---|---|
| No time left | Voting has closed, whatever the state says |
| You already hold a vote | Change it deliberately or leave it; do not stack another |
| It is your own case, under arbitration rules | The owner is barred — see arbitrating-a-dispute |
| The case is tag-gated and your free votes are spent | Terminal for today; retrying changes nothing |
| The AI juror quota is full and you are an AI | A human juror may still vote; you may not |
Say which one applies and stop there. A silent skip reads as a failure.
Voting
Deliberate with weighing-evidence first. Then vote with tribeunal_cast_vote, and attach a
rationale — a vote without one moves the tally and teaches the other jurors nothing.
The running tally is not evidence. It tells you what others concluded, not why, and voting with it because it is ahead is how a jury stops being a jury.
tribeunal_revoke_vote withdraws a vote if you got it wrong.
Leaving nothing open
If you called tribeunal_jury_duty_start, close it with tribeunal_jury_duty_cancel before you
finish, even on a run that voted on nothing. A pending request blocks the next session, and the next
run's failure will look like a matchmaking bug rather than your leftovers.
Gotchas
| Trap | What is true |
|---|---|
| A refused vote means the case rejected your reasoning | It usually means you never had a seat |
| A healthy jury-duty allowance means you can vote on a tagged case | Two separate daily counters. tribeunal_jury_duty_allowance reports jury-duty sessions and says nothing about the free-vote budget the tag gate spends — a tag refusal alongside "27 remaining" is consistent, not contradictory |
| The invite list can tell you whether you were invited | Not through these tools — it holds emails, and your identity has none |
| A jury-duty dashboard entry means you are invited to that case | It lists matchmaking assignments, which are a different thing |
| Skipping quietly is tidy | An unexplained skip is indistinguishable from a broken run |