The Three-Tier Contributor Model organises PointSav substrate contributors into Core (4–7 salaried engineers), Paid (50–100 contracted project contributors), and Open (10,000-plus public participants), with explicit mobility paths between tiers.

The PointSav substrate is too broad for any single team to maintain and too valuable to lock to a single team's release cadence. The Three-Tier Contributor Model that follows from this constraint produces three distinct tiers — Core, Paid, and Open — with explicit mobility paths between them. This article describes the tiers, the mathematics of why the model works, and the architectural primitives that make it tractable.

The three tiers

Core

The Core tier owns workspace documents, doctrine amendments, conventions, and the citations registry. Architectural decisions flow through this tier. Apprentice-mode oversight — the senior review function in the apprenticeship substrate — for new model versions and new contributors lives here.

This tier is small by design. Three architectural primitives keep it tractable: the substrate is operationally self-sufficient enough that customer breakouts do not require Core handholding; the Trajectory Substrate makes the substrate self-documenting; and the Adapter Composition Algebra makes operational personality composable rather than person-dependent.

Paid

Project-tier engineering work, paid by PointSav, executed via GitHub pull requests against the public substrate repositories. Engineering work in pointsav-monorepo/ and the per-project cluster paths. Multi-tenant aggregation services. Per-jurisdiction export adapters. LoRA adapter authoring. Customer-specific deployment provisioning and integration.

The 50–100 band is the size where individual contributor reputation can be tracked through the Trajectory Substrate's attribution, per-deliverable contracting is tractable without enterprise procurement bureaucracy, and revenue from multi-tenant aggregation services can sustain the headcount without venture-scale capital.

Open

Contributors to the public substrate via pull requests against the open repositories: pointsav/factory-release-engineering, pointsav-design-system, the wiki engine app-mediakit-knowledge, MCP server adapters, LoRA adapter recipes, and TOPIC content in the content-wiki-* repositories.

Apache 2.0 / MIT / CC BY 4.0 licensed contributions per the artefact tier. No CLA required for contributions to the open core; CLAs are only needed for dual-licensed commercial-tier components.

The 10,000-plus scale is plausible because comparable substrate communities have demonstrated it: the Linux kernel sustains roughly 14,000 contributors per year, the Apache Foundation crosses tens of thousands across projects, and Kubernetes carries 4,000-plus on a single project. The licensing posture (Apache 2.0 weights, CC BY 4.0 docs, MIT design-system) matches the licensing patterns that have demonstrably scaled to these levels.

The Open tier is what makes the substrate self-sustaining at a scale that 4–7 Core could not possibly maintain alone. Most substrate features ship via Open contribution; Core reviews and accepts; Paid implements the commercial-tier extensions that Open contributors do not typically tackle.

Cross-tier mobility

The model is not caste-bound. Three mobility paths operate:

• Open to Paid. A contributor whose recurring work shows operational quality is offered Paid contracts. Reputation derives from the Trajectory Substrate's attribution — how much each contributor's work shapes downstream recommendations.
• Paid to Core. Rare; requires alignment with PointSav's long-term substrate stewardship and senior operational trust.
• Anyone can fork, leave, and operate their own substrate. The Designed-for-Breakout property applies at the contributor level: a contributor can take their work, their adapters, and their tenant data and operate independently. The substrate does not lock contributors any more than it locks customers.

Why the math works

Naïve calculation: 4–7 employees plus 50–100 contractors plus 10,000-plus open contributors yields a substrate with the reach of a large platform team at roughly five percent of the headcount cost.

Three architectural primitives make it real:

1. The Trajectory Substrate makes contributor reputation cryptographically attributable, so Open-tier reputation can compound into Paid-tier eligibility without procurement bureaucracy.
2. The Adapter Composition Algebra lets individual contributors ship adapters without owning the whole substrate.
3. The Designed-for-Breakout property keeps the contributor relationship voluntary — no contributor is locked in, which means contributors participate because the substrate serves their interests, not because they cannot leave.

Forward-looking — scaling the Open tier

Per [ni-51-102] continuous-disclosure language, the trajectory toward 10,000-plus Open contributors is planned and intended, not declared as a current state. The shape is in place; the operational throughput matures as the substrate's user base grows.

The path: each Foundry-shaped customer who runs the substrate becomes a candidate Open contributor; a fraction of those contribute back; a fraction of those graduate to Paid; a small number graduate to Core over decades. The model is slow at the top tier and fast at the bottom — by design.

What this model is not

It is not a hierarchy in the dignity sense. The Open tier is not lower than Core; it is differently scoped. A contributor who ships a substrate-shaping LoRA adapter as Open is doing work the Core tier could not have done alone.

It is not a replacement for governance. Core makes architectural decisions; Paid implements; Open contributes. But the Constitutional Convention process per Doctrine §III is the venue for substrate-level disagreements, and any contributor can bring an amendment.

It is not a venture-scale labour model. The 50–100 Paid tier sustains on multi-tenant aggregation revenue without venture-scale capital — the unit economics work because the headcount is small, the deliverables are bounded, and the customer base pays for outcomes rather than tickets.

See Also

• compounding-substrate
• apprenticeship-substrate
• customer-hostability
• canadian-simple-copyright

References