How Do Committees Invent?

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   Your agent topology will copy the org chart; A2A is the protocol that makes the boundaries between agents explicit, so you can choose them.

   How Do Committees Invent? · 1968

   The boundaries between agents will be the boundaries between teams, unless you choose them.

   A2A (Agent2Agent) was announced by Google on 9 April 2025 and donated to the Linux Foundation on 23 June 2025; it has over 100 supporting organisations. The vocabulary: an agent "card" (what it can do), tasks with states, messages. MCP is vertical, agent-to-tool; A2A is horizontal, agent-to-agent. Conway's warning: if teams own agents, the agents will talk the way the teams talk — including not at all. Boundaries are chosen by who owns the data and who owns the privileges, not by department. In practice: one agent per bounded context; a public card of what it does; task states with an audit trail; no shared mutable memory between agents.

   “Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

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