prj-canon-federation/GOAL.md

repo	repo_flavor	project_status	started	reviewed
prj-canon-federation	project	draft	2026-08-16	2026-08-16

Project goal

Outcome

Establish a federated canon architecture in which every canonical concept has exactly one owner, and no two canons define the same concept.

The project will:

1. accept ADR-006 (canon federation and concept ownership) and resolve its six open ownership collisions;
2. rename identity-canon to commerce-canon in place, retaining git history, State Hub registration, and finished IDENTITY-WP-* workplans as provenance for the commercial content that stays;
3. land identity as an InfoTechCanon model (itc-ident), importing rather than redefining itc-org and itc-access concepts, filling the gap InfoTechCanonAccessControlModel.md:214 explicitly declines;
4. bring commerce-canon up to the InfoTechCanonRepositoryLayoutStandard structure (canon.yaml, infospace/ with kernel/models/standards, assimilation/, mappings/, profiles/);
5. distribute the identity-canon research corpus as provenance into whichever canon inherits the concepts it supports;
6. publish cross-canon interface cards so the three canons reference each other explicitly; and
7. leave no dangling identity-canon references anywhere in the fleet.

Invariants

• One owner per concept. No concept is defined by two canons. Downstream canons import; they never redefine.
• Custodian canon stays normative. Ecosystem governance (constitution, values, standards, ADRs) remains in the-custodian/canon/; the domain canons hold semantics, not ecosystem policy.
• Rename, do not re-found. identity-canon keeps its git history, hub registration, .repo-classification.yaml lineage, and finished workplans. Nothing is archived or deleted.
• Canon changes are review-gated. Content moves only after ADR-006 is accepted; each canon's own review gate still applies to its own content.
• This repo hosts no canon content. It coordinates. Concepts live in info-tech-canon and commerce-canon; decisions promote to Custodian canon.
• CommerceCanon grows by demand signal. New content enters through a demand signal with named consumer evidence, as InfoTechCanon already does. No speculative authoring.
• No content is lost in transit. Every concept present in identity-canon/canon/CanonicalGlossary.md at project start is accounted for at project end — moved, imported, or explicitly retired with rationale.

Success gates

Each gate needs accepted evidence before the project may move to completed.

G1 — Boundary accepted. ADR-006 status is accepted in Custodian canon, with all six open questions resolved and recorded.

G2 — Ownership ledger complete. A machine-readable ledger maps every concept from the project-start glossary to exactly one owning canon and model. A validation pass reports zero concepts with zero owners and zero with two.

G3 — Rename landed. commerce-canon exists as the renamed repository: forge remote, local path, hub repo slug, .repo-classification.yaml, and agent instructions all updated; git history continuous across the rename.

G4 — Identity model published. itc-ident exists at info-tech-canon/infospace/models/identity/, is registered in canon.yaml, appears in the kernel map, and defines no concept owned by itc-org or itc-access.

G5 — Commerce canon conforms. commerce-canon satisfies InfoTechCanonRepositoryLayoutStandard, carries canon.yaml, and holds the counterparty/commercial model with declared ownership.

G6 — Corpus preserved. The research/, terminology/, and scenarios/ material is present as provenance in the canon that inherited the concepts it supports, reachable from that canon's assimilation/.

G7 — Canons cross-reference. Each canon publishes an interface card naming what it imports from and exports to the others. The zero-cross-reference condition that motivated this project no longer holds.

G8 — No dangling references. A fleet sweep finds no live reference to identity-canon outside deliberate historical provenance.

Project retirement

This repository may be archived when:

1. all eight success gates have accepted evidence;
2. residuals are live work records owned outside this repository (per work-record-types_v0.1.md § Residuals) — in particular any deferred consumer adoption by fin-hub, target-revenue, adaptive-pricing, or qonto-assistant, which are explicitly not gates of this project;
3. durable decisions are promoted to permanent homes — ADR-006 in Custodian canon, ownership boundaries in each canon's own kernel documents;
4. the completion record is written to history/; and
5. a final consistency and link check passes.

Ongoing canon evolution is explicitly not a retirement blocker. This project ends when the federation exists and is correct, not when the canons are finished.