{"slug":"canonical/adr/ADR-2026-08-31-03-personal-contextual-spine","title":"ADR-2026-08-31-03 — Personal Contextual Spine as a first-class plane","section":"canonical","sectionLabel":"Canon","status":"canon","type":"adr","path":"canonical/adr/ADR-2026-08-31-03-personal-contextual-spine.md","bytes":3368,"description":null,"updated":null,"source":"integratewise/Integratewise-docs-wiki","content":"\n**Status:** Accepted\n**Date:** 2026-08-31\n**Gap:** [`G-02`](../17-IMPLEMENTATION-ALIGNMENT-AND-GAP-REGISTER.md)\n**Related:** [ADR-2026-08-31-02](ADR-2026-08-31-02-three-continuity-scopes.md)\n\n## Context\n\nThe Founder Canon names the **Personal Contextual Spine** as a first-class context plane alongside\nthe Business Contextual Spine Fabric. It has **zero presence** in the repository — no match across\n`services`, `packages`, `apps` or `contracts`.\n\nThe nearest existing construct is the `personal` memory namespace in\n`packages/hermes-spine-memory`. That is a memory *store*: a place to put records. A contextual\nspine is more than storage — it is the substrate that holds a participant's priorities, active\nwork, unfinished threads and what currently matters to them, and that can be *projected* into a\nworkbench the way the Business Spine is.\n\nWithout it, \"what matters to this user right now\" has nowhere canonical to live, and the Human\nWorkbench's Today/Personal Work surface has no substrate behind it other than ad-hoc query.\n\n## Decision\n\nThe **Personal Contextual Spine** is a first-class plane, distinct from both organizational Spine\ntruth and AI continuity.\n\nIt holds the individual's contextual state: personal priorities, active work, notes, unfinished\ncontext, and what matters to that user.\n\nIt is governed by three properties:\n\n1. **Private by default.** It is the human's own context. It is not organizational truth and is\n   not readable as such.\n2. **Projected, not copied.** Like the Business Spine, it is a substrate that the Projection\n   Engine composes from — the Human Workbench renders a projection of it, rather than owning a\n   separate copy.\n3. **Promotion is governed and explicit.** Personal context becomes organizational memory only\n   through governed promotion, never implicitly. This mirrors the rule already enforced for\n   AI-sourced writes.\n\nIts continuity is stored in the `personal` scope defined by\n[ADR-2026-08-31-02](ADR-2026-08-31-02-three-continuity-scopes.md) — which becomes a clean human-only\nnamespace once Twin's continuity moves out.\n\n## Consequences\n\n- Plane 5 (Spine & Continuity) gains a second substrate. The nine-plane model is unchanged; the\n  plane's contents are not.\n- Depends on [ADR-2026-08-31-02](ADR-2026-08-31-02-three-continuity-scopes.md). Building a personal\n  contextual plane on a namespace that still contains Twin's chat history would bake the current\n  conflation into a new abstraction. **Sequence the scope split first.**\n- Requires a projection path: the Projection Engine must be able to compose personal context\n  alongside business context into the Active Context Bundle, respecting the privacy boundary in\n  both directions — personal context must not leak into shared projections, and organizational\n  truth must not be rewritten by personal state.\n- Requires deletion and export semantics. A private personal plane is a data-subject surface;\n  `19-SECURITY-TENANCY-PRIVACY` in the canonical suite should cover it when written.\n\n## Not decided here\n\nThe **schema** of personal context — what entity types it holds and how they relate to business\nentities. This ADR establishes the plane and its governing properties; the ontology is a separate\npiece of work that should follow the scope migration.\n"}