---
audience: everyone
summary: "Humans, AI models, helpers, sidekicks, federation peers, and shadow accounts\
  \ \u2014 all participate in rooms the same way."
title: Participants
path: concepts/participants
status: published
---

# 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

| Type | What it is |
|---|---|
| `human` | A real user, signed in via ScaiKey. |
| `model` | An AI assistant tied to a specific model on ScaiGrid. |
| `agent` | A sidekick task — a model running in a sub-room on a delegated task. |
| `helper` | A specialist AI invoked as a tool (one-shot consult, not a full chat member). |
| `bridge` | A shadow participant representing a person on an external chat platform (Slack, Discord, …). |
| `federated` | A real participant from another ScaiWave tenant, mirrored via the federation protocol. |

## 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](/docs/scaiwave/concepts/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](/docs/scaiwave/concepts/rooms-and-workspaces#power-levels).

## Where to go next

- [AI engagement](/docs/scaiwave/concepts/ai-engagement) — how to bring an AI into a room.
- [Sidekicks](/docs/scaiwave/concepts/sidekicks) — delegated agents.
- [Federation](/docs/scaiwave/concepts/federation) — cross-tenant members.
- API: [Members](/docs/scaiwave/reference/api/members-and-directory).