rasci — declared by cat-harness — cited, not ingested

Applies when. Who is involved, when a role does the work without owning the deliverable. Use it where a separate Supportive party is real — someone who contributes effort or resources to an activity that another role answers for. If no such party exists, use raci instead: a fifth letter nobody fills is a column that makes the chart look more considered than it is. Like raci it answers who, never what or whether — a one-off choice among options is kepner-tregoe, a recurring rule is dmn, certainty of evidence is grade, the record of a decision is madr, situation analysis is swot.

Origin. NOT ESTABLISHED FROM ANY SOURCE HELD HERE, and that is stated rather than guessed. RASCI (also written RASIC) is the five-letter member of the responsibility-assignment-matrix family from project-management practice. No text for it is ingested in this repository and none was reachable when this node was written. The one RACI source this checkout does hold — library/dusengumuremyi-2026-ai-mediated-raci — was searched and contains ZERO occurrences of rasci, racsi, supportive or five roles, so it backs raci and expressly not this. The candidates are the same paid standards and books listed in raci’s §”The primary is still not held”. See literature-search.

Node file: rasci.md

RASCI — the fifth letter, and when it earns its place

Adopted on the owner’s ruling, 2026-09-23 (issue #1004), as a parallel track to raci, not a replacement for it. methodology-adoption: “Two or more methodologies may answer the same question. Do not blend them… pick one per decision, name it, and follow it.” A process here declares which it is written in, and declaring nothing means raci.

⚠ This rendering is not backed by a source
No RASCI source is ingested here, and nothing below is asserted on a source’s authority. What follows is the method as commonly understood — weaker than a cited rendering, and marked as weaker on purpose.
check:methodology-evidence reports this node as unbacked, correctly. Do not remove that finding by pointing evidence at the RACI paper. It was searched: zero occurrences of rasci, racsi, supportive or five roles. Citing it here would be the failure methodology-adoption §”Never write a method from recall and cite a paper nobody fetched” names, made worse by the citation being checkably about something else.

The five letters

letter	means	direction
Responsible	does the work	may be several
Accountable	carries the decision; answers for the outcome	exactly one
Supportive	contributes effort or resources to the work, without owning the deliverable	may be several
Consulted	asked for input before	two-way
Informed	told after	one-way

Four of these are raci’s and are not restated here — the node is raci.md, including the exactly-one-Accountable constraint, which RASCI inherits unchanged.

What S is, against its two neighbours

S is not a weaker R. The line is ownership of the deliverable, not quantity of effort: a Supportive party may do more work than the Responsible one and still be S, because the deliverable is not theirs to hand over.

S is not a Consulted who happened to help. C is asked for input and gives an opinion; S does work. Collapsing them is the same error as collapsing C into I — it turns a contribution into a conversation, and the chart still reads as complete.

The test: if this role stopped participating, would the activity be late (S), or merely less well informed (C)? A role whose absence changes nothing but opinion was never S.

When NOT to use it

A five-letter chart where every S column is empty is worse than a four-letter one, because it advertises a distinction the author did not actually make. The fifth letter is justified by a Supportive party existing, not by wanting a more complete-looking matrix. raci remains the default here for exactly that reason.

How this platform applies it

S is declarable; R still is not — and the asymmetry is structural rather than an omission.

A BPMN activity sits in exactly one lane, and that lane is Responsible. So the lane is a discriminator, not a description: R is the owning lane, S is a declared role that is not it, and no case can be both. This was checked against the corpus before the letter was added — no activity anywhere declares involvement="responsible" — so the premise holds and S inherits no ambiguity from it.

It buys real expressiveness rather than a letter for its own sake: BPMN cannot place one activity in two lanes, so before this there was no way to say “this role also does the work here”.

A process opts in:

<bpmn:process id="Process_X">
  <bpmn:extensionElements>
    <cat-harness.processes:involvement vocabulary="rasci"/>
  </bpmn:extensionElements>

and may then declare <cat-harness.processes:raci ref="<role>" involvement="supportive"/>. In a process that has not opted in, a supportive is a reported breach — neither coerced to a neighbouring letter nor silently dropped. That refusal is what makes this a choice rather than a spelling rule; check:raci and the raci-involvement-vocabulary QA criterion carry it, and the skill skills/process/raci/raci.md holds the platform overlay both vocabularies share.