---
title: Members and Roles
description: Admins, members and couriers. Who may create, who may write, and how an automated writer is treated.
---

## Admins and members
An **admin** creates entities, coins tags, invites people and sets the rules
of anything in the workspace. An admin who owns an entity writes its guides
and decides who may read and write it.

A **member** reads everything the workspace serves and writes content to
entities whose rules allow it. Members cannot create entities or coin tags,
which keeps the vocabulary from forking.

You choose someone's access when you invite them, and people sign in with an emailed
link. An admin also **describes** each member: a
display name, a role, and what they handle. That description
publishes a person to agents; `get_team_members` serves described members
only, by name and role, with no emails or ids.

## Couriers
Some of what a team knows arrives on a schedule rather than in a
conversation: a number from your analytics, the meetings your notes tool
recorded, the tickets closed this week. A **courier** is a small job that
fetches one of those sources and writes what it found into the workspace. It
follows the entity's retrieval guide and relays what the source returned; it
never estimates or summarizes, and when the source has nothing it writes
nothing.

Couriers are listed beside the people as members of their own type. You add
one by name and decide its reach: whether it may read everything the team
reads, and whether it may update anything the team updates. Both start off,
so a new courier can write nothing until you say so. It gets a connection
key, a single credential it sends with every request. Each job has its own
courier, so removing one stops one job, and a 401 tells the job its key was
withdrawn.

A courier cannot create an entity, write a guide, retag or delete an entry. Everything a courier
writes is served wrapped as data, whatever the entity, because it came from
outside the workspace.

You do not have to write a courier yourself. A [routine](/concepts/routines)
is the same job authored with a coding agent and run by Foundation, under a
courier's name.