Co-commitment by distinct parties, certification gated on re-executing the record's rule, and non-author approval before merge in 25 GitHub repositories

Abstract

A decision can stand when only one party committed to it: a merged software change, an authorization, an oversight verdict. A valid signature shows which key asserted a value. It does not show that anyone else took part. This paper specifies a determination that exists only when at least two parties with distinct declared controllers have co-signed the same committed source. A single-party attempt, or two commitments that declare one controller, is refused with a typed reason, though every signature verifies. The record names parties only by digest and can be re-derived offline, with no issuing, anchoring or revocation service. A human certification of a machine-generated determination is admitted only when the reviewer, shown no correct answer, produces a value that the record's own rule accepts when re-executed, and the certification records no attribute of the reviewer. Its evaluation used synthetic data only, and one pre-registered hypothesis was reported as violated. As a measurement, every pull request merged from July to September 2026 in 25 public GitHub repositories chosen by a fixed star rule was read. Each one whose author resolved to an account not marked as a bot was typed by whether a non-author account not marked as a bot approved it before the merge. Of those 13,594 merges, 11,197 had no such approval. The figures that follow were computed after the run. The 11,197 are 82% of the 13,594. Most of them are in one repository, and three accounts in that repository authored 7,711 of them. Without that repository, the figure is 2,134 of 4,199 (51%). The merging account was not read, and a GitHub approval is not a signature over the merged commit.