Canonadr

ADR-2026-08-31-03 — Personal Contextual Spine as a first-class plane

Status: Accepted
Date: 2026-08-31
Gap: G-02
Related: ADR-2026-08-31-02

Context

The Founder Canon names the Personal Contextual Spine as a first-class context plane alongside
the Business Contextual Spine Fabric. It has zero presence in the repository — no match across
services, packages, apps or contracts.

The nearest existing construct is the personal memory namespace in
packages/hermes-spine-memory. That is a memory store: a place to put records. A contextual
spine is more than storage — it is the substrate that holds a participant's priorities, active
work, unfinished threads and what currently matters to them, and that can be projected into a
workbench the way the Business Spine is.

Without it, "what matters to this user right now" has nowhere canonical to live, and the Human
Workbench's Today/Personal Work surface has no substrate behind it other than ad-hoc query.

Decision

The Personal Contextual Spine is a first-class plane, distinct from both organizational Spine
truth and AI continuity.

It holds the individual's contextual state: personal priorities, active work, notes, unfinished
context, and what matters to that user.

It is governed by three properties:

  1. Private by default. It is the human's own context. It is not organizational truth and is
    not readable as such.
  2. Projected, not copied. Like the Business Spine, it is a substrate that the Projection
    Engine composes from — the Human Workbench renders a projection of it, rather than owning a
    separate copy.
  3. Promotion is governed and explicit. Personal context becomes organizational memory only
    through governed promotion, never implicitly. This mirrors the rule already enforced for
    AI-sourced writes.

Its continuity is stored in the personal scope defined by
ADR-2026-08-31-02 — which becomes a clean human-only
namespace once Twin's continuity moves out.

Consequences

  • Plane 5 (Spine & Continuity) gains a second substrate. The nine-plane model is unchanged; the
    plane's contents are not.
  • Depends on ADR-2026-08-31-02. Building a personal
    contextual plane on a namespace that still contains Twin's chat history would bake the current
    conflation into a new abstraction. Sequence the scope split first.
  • Requires a projection path: the Projection Engine must be able to compose personal context
    alongside business context into the Active Context Bundle, respecting the privacy boundary in
    both directions — personal context must not leak into shared projections, and organizational
    truth must not be rewritten by personal state.
  • Requires deletion and export semantics. A private personal plane is a data-subject surface;
    19-SECURITY-TENANCY-PRIVACY in the canonical suite should cover it when written.

Not decided here

The schema of personal context — what entity types it holds and how they relate to business
entities. This ADR establishes the plane and its governing properties; the ontology is a separate
piece of work that should follow the scope migration.