Governance and StandardsIndex

This category covers the formal decision records, licensing posture, contributor model, and compliance requirements that govern how the PointSav platform is built, licensed, and changed over time. Governance articles are the written record of decisions that have been made and the rationale behind them; they are not aspirational statements.

The twelve binding architecture decisions are the most important entries in this category for technical due diligence and regulatory review: they define where automated processing stops and human authority begins, how data is separated, and where cryptographic keys must reside. Licensing articles explain the licence matrix that governs each repository and its contents. The contributor model article describes the three-tier structure through which code and content flow from contributors to the canonical platform. The BCSC disclosure posture article documents the requirements of Canadian securities continuous-disclosure obligations as they apply to the platform and its public documentation.

Start here for procurement, security, and compliance evaluation: Procurement overview — what a regulated buyer acquires, and the compliance properties enforced by architecture rather than contractual promise.

Where to start

Nineteen articles cover how engineering decisions are made, recorded, and licensed. These six are what a due-diligence reader should read in order: the binding decisions, the hardest one of them written up in full, the disclosure posture, what a buyer actually acquires, where the intellectual property sits, and who is permitted to contribute.

• Architecture decisions — The twelve binding decisions that constrain every engineering choice on the platform.
• SYS-ADR-07: zero AI in Ring 1 — The hardest of those decisions in full: no AI inference anywhere on the authoritative write path.
• Compliance and continuous disclosure — The regulatory frameworks the architecture addresses, and why audit evidence is exposed continuously rather than certified once a year.
• Procurement overview — What a regulated buyer actually acquires: hardware they own outright, data the vendor never holds, compliance enforced by architecture.
• Legal and IP structure — The three-corporation topology, and the squash-and-merge event that transfers intellectual property from contributor to vendor to customer.
• Three-tier contributor model — The Core, Paid, and Open contributor tiers and the mobility paths between them.

Institutional due diligence

Start here for procurement, security, and compliance evaluation.

• Procurement overview — What a regulated buyer acquires deploying PointSav: hardware the customer owns outright, data the vendor never holds, and compliance enforced by architecture.
• Compliance and continuous disclosure — The regulatory frameworks the PointSav architecture addresses, and its structural approach to exposing audit evidence continuously, not via annual certification.

Formal decision records

• Architecture decisions — Twelve binding architecture decisions governing how the PointSav platform is built, constraining engineering work on data handling, oversight, and deployment custody.
• SYS-ADR-07: zero AI in Ring 1 — SYS-ADR-07 prohibits AI inference from all Ring 1 boundary-ingest services, enforcing deterministic-only operations at the WORM write path.

Licensing and contribution

• Three-tier contributor model — The Three-Tier Contributor Model organises substrate contributors into Core (4-7 engineers), Paid (50-100 contractors), and Open (10,000+ public), with mobility paths.
• Canadian-simple copyright posture — The platform's IP vests in a single Canadian parent holding company by operation of Canadian Copyright Act § 13(3), without inter-company assignment.
• Legal and IP structure — The three-corporation topology governing IP transfer from contributor to vendor to customer, with squash-and-merge as the atomic IP-transfer event.

Engineering sovereignty

• Sovereign replacement initiative — The engineering governance program tracking third-party dependencies, isolating them in quarantine, and coordinating the moonshot programs replacing them.
• Moonshot initiatives — Moonshot initiatives are active engineering programs building native replacements for quarantined third-party dependencies, reducing vendor lock-in.
• Sovereign airlock — The staged-commit protocol enforcing separation between staging identities and canonical repository identities — two staging authors, two admin push identities.

Platform disciplines

• Ontological governance — Four reference vocabulary ledgers kept deliberately narrow, plus a human-verification loop that reviews extracted identity fragments before they enter the verified ledger.
• Anti-homogenization discipline — Anti-homogenization discipline resists AI writing assistants pulling contributors toward a single voice, by flagging potential issues rather than silently rewriting text.
• API key boundary discipline — The rule that all external LLM API credentials belong exclusively at the gateway service and never at inference engines.
• Doctrine invention #7 — the integrity anchor — How Foundry's anchor-emitter binary posts a signed ledger checkpoint to Sigstore Rekor each month, providing independently verifiable, third-party evidence of workspace state.

See also

• Wiki home
• Architecture
• Security and Trust — the platform's security posture, protection mechanisms, and record verification
• Infrastructure
• Design System — visual and brand surface conventions
• Reference