# Emission Cadence promotion gate — restatement

Date: 2026-09-21 (Europe/Berlin)
Decision: **INFO-DEC-2026-002 — split the gate; promote to candidate.**
Origin: INFO-WP-0019-T06, waiting since 2026-09-05, rechecked 2026-09-09 and
2026-09-20 with no change in the evidence. Operator chose restatement over
soliciting declarations.

## The problem with the gate as written

SCOPE.md required "two independent Emission Cadence source implementations"
before draft promotion. One sentence was doing two different jobs:

1. **Is the contract specified well enough to implement against?** A question
   about this repository's own work, answerable here.
2. **Does the contract survive contact with implementers who did not write it?**
   A question about other people's systems, unanswerable here by construction.

Because both sat behind one gate, the second blocked the first. The standard
stayed at `draft` — a word that reads as "unfinished specification" — when what
was actually missing was adoption. A reader could not tell which.

The canon-side work has been complete since 2026-09-05 and was re-tested on
2026-09-20: `emission-review` validates an arbitrary source-owned declaration
against the named schema and reports `operational_truth_assessed: false`;
`export-emission-contract` produces a content-addressed bundle at digest
`972c0b6701d1693f` whose manifest states the adoption requirement in words; the
consumption path is documented for a consumer outside this repository. Nothing
in that set needs an external party.

## Decision

Split the gate into two levels, recorded in the standard itself as section 10
rather than only in SCOPE.md, so a reader meets it where the contract is.

- **Candidate** — the contract is specified, machine-checkable, and stable
  enough to implement against. Met today. Asserts nothing about adoption.
- **Stable** — the contract survives independent implementation: two
  source-owned declarations from owners independent of each other and of this
  repository, pinned to a contract digest, plus an observer result from a party
  other than the declaring source, and a recorded incompatibility or recorded
  absence of one.

Emission Cadence moves to `candidate` at document version `0.2.0`. The wire
contract is unchanged at schema version `0.1`, and `0.x` still means
incompatible change remains possible with migration guidance.

## What was given up

The original gate, honestly read, meant the standard could not be promoted at
all until two external owners acted. Splitting it means this repository can now
say the specification work is finished while adoption is not — but it also means
**the word "candidate" no longer carries any interoperability evidence**. That
is a real reduction in what a status word tells a reader, and it is mitigated
only by the standard stating plainly, in section 10, that no consumer has
implemented the contract and that its own worked example is not a source-owned
declaration.

The stable gate is deliberately *stricter* than what it replaced: it adds the
observer result and the recorded-incompatibility requirement, which the single
sentence never asked for. Nothing was relaxed about interoperability; what
changed is that the claim is now made at the level where it can be earned.

## Limits

Agent review, not human sign-off. Candidate status records no consumer adoption,
no runtime claim, and no conformance statement by any party. The promotion
changes no field, form or validation rule; a producer conformant yesterday is
conformant today.