The State-Based Collaboration Framework

State is the central object of collaboration: the case, document, ticket, workflow instance, or aggregate that multiple people care about. Modeling state explicitly means deciding what matters, how it is represented, and which aspects are allowed to change independently.

Transitions define how state is allowed to change over time. Instead of free-form status updates, transitions make state evolution explicit: from which state, to which state, under which conditions, and triggered by whom.

Actions represent what participants are trying to do: approve, reject, assign, comment, request changes, escalate. They are the bridge between user intent and transitions. Modeling actions explicitly clarifies what people can meaningfully do in each state.

Events capture what actually occurred: which action was taken, on which state, by which actor, at what time. Events make collaboration auditable and replayable, and they often form the foundation for projections and analytics.

Action-control policies define which actions are allowed for which actors in which states. This is where roles, permissions, and business rules meet the concrete actions and transitions in the system.

Filters determine which subset of states or events a participant sees in a given context. They are essential for making collaboration manageable: showing people what matters now, hiding what doesn't, and preventing information overload.

Data-access policies govern which data each participant is allowed to see. They combine security, compliance, and business rules, making sure that collaboration does not leak sensitive information.

Projections turn events and state into views optimized for particular use cases: timelines, dashboards, queues, histories. They let different participants understand the same underlying reality from their own angle.