# Adopting the Emission Cadence contract as a source owner

The Emission Cadence standard is at **candidate** (document `0.2.0`, wire schema
version `0.1`). Candidate means the contract is specified and machine-checkable.
It asserts nothing about adoption: no source has implemented it.

This page is what a source owner needs in order to change that. It asks for a
declaration you own, not for a change to your system.

## What the contract is for

A source declares how often it emits an event class, so that an observer can
tell **silence that means nothing happened** from **silence that means the source
stopped**. Without a declared cadence, an absent event is unreadable. The
standard keeps the two roles apart: the source declares, the observer evaluates,
and a declaration is never evidence that the emission actually happens.

## What a source owner supplies

1. **A declaration you own**, valid against
   `infospace/schemas/emission-cadence.schema.yaml`, published in your own
   repository. It states your `source`, your `stream_id`, and one entry per
   event class you own, in one of the declared forms:
   - `expected-rate` — at least N events in a window, below which a finding is raised;
   - `heartbeat-or-reconciliation` — either a heartbeat asserting
     `nothing-to-report`, or a comparison between your own counts and the
     observer's.
2. **The contract digest you implemented against**, so the declaration is pinned
   to a fixed reading of the contract rather than to whatever the canon says
   later. Current digest: `972c0b6701d1693f`
   (`info_tech_canon export-emission-contract <path.tar>` regenerates it).
3. **Nothing else.** No deployment, no runtime proof, no conformance claim. A
   declaration is a statement of intended cadence.

Validate before publishing:

```bash
info_tech_canon emission-review path/to/your-declaration.yaml
```

It returns `ok` plus `operational_truth_assessed: false` — the command checks
your declaration against the schema and deliberately says nothing about whether
your system emits at that cadence.

`infospace/standards/emission-cadence/examples/qonto-assistant.yaml` shows both
forms. It is a worked example and explicitly not a source-owned declaration.

## What an observer supplies

Separately from any source: a result produced by evaluating a source's declared
cadence against events you actually observed, with the comparison references the
declaration names. An observer result from the declaring source does not count —
the point is that two parties read the same declaration the same way.

## What this repository does with it

Validates submitted declarations, records them as adoption evidence, and reports
any incompatibility found in the attempt. It does not operate your system,
observe your events, or certify your conformance.

Two source-owned declarations from independent owners, plus one third-party
observer result, plus a recorded incompatibility or a recorded absence of one,
are what the standard's section 10 requires to move from candidate to stable.

## What is honestly uncertain

The contract has never been implemented by anyone. The most useful thing a first
adopter can report is **where it does not fit** — a cadence your system has that
neither form expresses, a window semantics mismatch, an event class that needs
more than one entry. A recorded incompatibility is a successful outcome of this
exercise, not a failure of it.