The parts have deliberate names. Charter, executive, archive, and creed, and the system they belong to, Ordova. None of them is decoration. Each was chosen to keep meaning true as the implementation underneath it changes. Here is the thinking, from the principle down to the individual names.
A name that describes how a thing is built today rots the day the build changes. A name that describes what everything nearby also claims to be collides with all of them. The naming here follows three rules, so a name outlives both traps.
Not by the implementation, which changes, and not by a property many things share. A name tied to a tool becomes a lie when the tool is swapped; a name like "canonical" collides with everything else that is also authoritative. Name the one role only this part plays.
A part's name tends to be repeated in dozens of places: config, links, folder names, slugs. That is the same fact authored many times, the very anti-pattern this system exists to kill. Declare identity in one place and derive the rest, so a future rename costs one edit, not a hunt.
A name that is already crowded in the surrounding software space is a weak name however apt it feels. The more public the thing becomes, the more a soft collision costs, so a name is vetted against the field it will live in, not just against taste.
The four parts are named as a small civic order. You legislate; the charter is the law; the executive enforces it; the archive records what happened. Three of them are public, civic institutions. The fourth, creed, is the one inner layer that is yours. The frame is deliberate: civic and public on one side, personal and private on the other.
The authored rules, invariants, and postures. The methodology, written down and held to.
The live configuration that puts the charter into practice: the hooks, settings, and automation the work runs under.
The memory: notes, decisions, handoffs, and the derived documents that record the work as it happens.
The one inner layer, specific to the operator. Private by nature, distinct from the public civic law.
creed was chosen over the plainer word rule on purpose: "rule" would
overload against the sense of law already carried by charter and executive. It needed a word for a
personal observance that did not collide with the civic vocabulary.
The personal layer draws its shape from an old model: the monastic Rule, and specifically the
Rule of St. Benedict. Two properties of that Rule make it the right anchor for what
creed means.
Benedict's Rule is not law handed down by a hierarchy. It is a structure a community freely takes up to order its own life. The Latin regula means a measuring rod, or a trellis: a frame you grow along, not a cage. That is exactly the personal layer, the inner observance that is yours, as distinct from the public civic law that is the charter.
Benedict did not invent his Rule from nothing, nor merely obey an inherited one. He took a
sterner, older rule and reshaped it into a more humane, more measured version, one famously
tuned so the strong have something to strive for and the weak nothing to run from. That move,
taking the inherited rules and making them your own, is the conceptual heart of creed.
The monastic Rule is the analogy; creed is the name.
The system these parts make up is called Ordova. It is a coinage, chosen for ownability rather than for meaning packed into the word.
A founded, ordered world, with the settled feel of a place name. Named for the order it brings, not spelled out in the letters. The point of the word is that it can be owned, not that it explains itself.
The obvious instinct is to name a governance system after governance: law, principle, order, constitution. That instinct is a dead end. In and around software, that vocabulary is already exhausted. The apt, meaningful words are taken, and a name that collides on the exact concept is a weak name no matter how well it reads. The ownable names live in coinages, so the choice was a coined word with the right feel and no exact-concept collision, over a meaningful word already worn smooth by everyone else who reached for it.