Participants

Everyone — and everything — in a room is a participant. ScaiWave treats humans and AIs through the same primitives so that you can @ either, give either a power level, redact either's messages, and so on.

Types#

What every participant has#

• A local id — short slug, used in @mentions and slash commands (@alice, @code-helper).
• A server name — the host of their home server (your own for local users; the peer host for federated ones).
• An FQID — @local_id:server_name, globally unique. Federated rooms surface FQIDs for foreign participants.
• A display name and optional avatar.
• A participant type (one of the above).
• For AIs: a model id, system prompt, optional plugin loadout, temperature and other sampling parameters, and a per- helper daily token cap.

Humans#

A human participant maps one-to-one to a ScaiKey identity. Most fields sync automatically from ScaiKey: display name, avatar, email, group memberships, role assignments. ScaiWave caches them in sw_participants and reconciles via a webhook (fast path) plus a periodic cron (slow path).

AI assistants (model)#

The AIs you talk to. Each is configured by an admin under Admin → AI:

• Connection: which model on ScaiGrid, with what auth (per-user exchange token, or the tenant's service token).
• System prompt: the model's persistent instructions.
• Plugins: which tools the AI can call (web search, drive search, notes, todos, web fetch, …).
• Response mode: streaming (live token stream) or conversational (paragraph-by-paragraph flush).
• Per-helper config: temperature, daily token cap, planner enabled, helper-mode (above- or below-threshold dispatcher).
• Engagement policy: how the AI joins rooms — by mention, by default, or only when explicitly engaged.

Sidekicks (agent)#

A sidekick is an AI model that's been spawned into a delegated room to work on a specific task in parallel with the main conversation. Sidekicks run autonomously up to a configured step / token / time cap, then report their result back to the parent room. See Sidekicks.

Helpers (helper)#

A helper is a specialist AI exposed as a tool that other AIs can call. Where a sidekick is a delegate that runs in the background, a helper is a one-shot synchronous consult: the calling AI invokes ask_<helper_slug>(question), the helper returns a clean answer, the calling AI continues.

Helpers are how you encapsulate a tuned sub-prompt or a more expensive / specialist model. Use them when you want every AI in the tenant to be able to consult a specific persona (legal helper, code review helper, on-call SRE helper) without copy-pasting prompts.

Bridge participants (bridge)#

When you bridge a room to Slack (or Discord / Teams / a remote ScaiWave), foreign users show up as bridge participants with their remote name and avatar. They're full first-class members of the mirrored room — you can mention them, reply, react — but they exist only as shadows of the source-of-truth identity on the other side.

Federation participants (federated)#

A participant from a peer ScaiWave tenant joins your room as a federated participant. Unlike bridges, federation is symmetric and end-to-end signed: every event from a federated participant is cryptographically signed by their home server's Ed25519 key.

Power levels and roles#

See Rooms and workspaces → power levels.

Where to go next#

• AI engagement — how to bring an AI into a room.
• Sidekicks — delegated agents.
• Federation — cross-tenant members.
• API: Members.