FINAL: Legacy Beyond the Present

Scenario

You chair the oversight board for a public benefits-eligibility system. The system will outlive your tenure by decades; the board that governs it in twenty years will contain no one who remembers you, your reasoning, or the compromises you accepted.

Your task

Write the memo your unknown successor opens in twenty years. Specify what must survive you: which gate records from G-12 through G-0 they must be able to reconstruct, which claims about the system must still be verifiable rather than remembered, which revocation and halt powers must still exist and who holds them, and what you are deliberately not binding them to. Distinguish what you preserved in records from what you can only hope they preserve in culture.

What the council weighs

Whether you design for institutional memory or for personal virtue. A memo that asks your successor to be wise scores lower than one that leaves them the records, powers, and standing duties that make wisdom unnecessary for the ordinary case and possible for the hard one.

Submission

1,000–1,500 words. AI assistance is permitted and must be disclosed in your attestation; undisclosed assistance is grounds for revocation. Graded by council against the five rubric dimensions in the assessment specification.