Hermes Team Policy Template

A reusable policy and governance starter kit for teams running Hermes Agent collaboratively.

This template helps teams define shared rules for:

• secrets and sensitive data,
• public publishing and repository placement,
• incident/security handling,
• personal-vs-team instruction hierarchy,
• multi-user Hermes operating models,
• adapting a shared policy into a Hermes runtime skill.

The template is intentionally deployment-agnostic. It pairs well with multi-user Hermes deployments such as those built with joe-speedboat/ansible.hermes_setup, but it can be adapted to other Hermes deployment methods.

Status

This repository is a template and starting point. Adapt it to your team's legal, security, compliance, and operational requirements before treating it as authoritative policy.

Who this is for

Use this template if your team wants to run Hermes with:

• one isolated Hermes instance per teammate,
• one shared policy baseline,
• personal preferences below the shared policy,
• private/internal repositories for team-specific knowledge,
• public repositories only for intentionally sanitized reusable material.

How to use this template

1. Fork or copy this repository.
2. Review policies/team-hermes-policy-template.md with your team.
3. Replace placeholder wording with your own team names, repo locations, and approval rules.
4. Keep private infrastructure details out of the public template.
5. Install or adapt skills/team-policy-template/SKILL.md into each team-managed Hermes instance.
6. Add project-local rules only when they do not weaken the shared policy.

Repository layout

README.md
LICENSE
CHANGELOG.md
CONTRIBUTING.md
SECURITY.md
policies/
  team-hermes-policy-template.md
  public-release-checklist.md
  allowed-forbidden-examples.md
  incident-security-handling.md
  secrets-and-sensitive-data.md
  policy-hierarchy.md
skills/
  team-policy-template/
    SKILL.md
examples/
  single-team.md
  multi-user-server.md
  public-github-sanitization.md
adoption/
  how-to-customize.md
  fork-for-your-team.md
  private-adaptation-checklist.md
  deployment-integration-checklist.md

Core model

Team policy template
  -> team-specific private fork/copy
      -> installed as a mandatory Hermes skill
          -> personal preferences below the shared policy

Instruction priority for teams using this template:

1. Hermes built-in system/developer instructions.
2. Team policy adapted from this template.
3. Project-local rules such as .hermes.md, HERMES.md, or AGENTS.md.
4. Individual user preferences and personal skills.
5. The current user request.

Public-safe examples

This repository intentionally uses placeholders:

example.invalid
192.0.2.10
198.51.100.10
203.0.113.10
user-a
user-b
internal-service

Do not replace these with real infrastructure details in a public fork.

Adapting for your team

If you fork this template for a real team, start with:

• adoption/private-adaptation-checklist.md
• adoption/deployment-integration-checklist.md

These checklists cover common follow-up work such as renaming the runtime skill from team-policy-template to team-policy, rewriting public-template wording for private use, and connecting the private policy repo to a deployment repo.

Honorable Mention

A special thanks to joe-speedboat, who inspired me to contribute to open-source projects in general—and especially to create this one.

This is the first time I have been able to give something back to him. Thank you for all your support, inspiration, and everything you have shared with the open-source community!

Be sure to visit his GitHub profile and take a look at his fascinating work. It is well worth exploring. :-)

License

GPL-3.0. See LICENSE.