Where things get said, and where they count

Version 0.1 · Status: EXPERIMENTAL · The governing rule is §7

Six places conversation happens. Only one of them is the record.

The failure this prevents is governance quietly leaking into whichever channel is most convenient and least written down.

Section numbers are fixed — other documents cite them.

1. Plane A — the repository

Holds the authoritative record: specifications, project records, schemas, proposals, pull requests, decisions, ballots, conformance results, release history, and the governance log.

A statement is not part of the decision record until it is attached to the relevant proposal.

2. Plane B — discussion

Long-form, threaded, quotable, moderated, with persistent URLs and a searchable archive. Repository discussions at version 0.1; something like Discourse at scale.

Every topic references a proposal or record ID. A serious argument acquires force only when the author or sponsor writes it into the proposal record — not when it is posted.

3. Plane C — chat

Open, federated, self-hostable, rooms per area. Never canonical.

Anything material that surfaces in chat — a decision, an objection, evidence — has to be written back to the proposal record by whoever wants it to count.

4. Plane D — broadcast

Subscribable by project, interface, domain, proposal class, governance change or security notice. Mailing list, feeds, webhooks.

Broadcast exists so that governance never depends on someone happening to watch a chat room. Every event that starts a clock (GOVERNANCE.md §3) is broadcast when it starts.

5. Plane E — meetings

Calls are allowed. Binding decisions in calls are not.

No binding decision exists only in a meeting.

Any meeting touching a proposal publishes: agenda · who attended · a recording where appropriate · minutes · proposal links · what was decided · unresolved objections · assigned actions.

Those minutes enter Plane A. Only then does any of it count.

6. Plane F — private

Private channels are legitimate for exactly four things:

• Vulnerability details
• Personal safety
• Active exploitation
• Credential compromise

Every governance action taken privately must later produce a public, appropriately redacted record: what authority acted · what changed · why · for how long · on what evidence · when it gets reviewed (GOVERNANCE.md §8, SECURITY.md §4).

7. The rule everything else serves

A claim, objection, agreement or decision cannot acquire any governance force until it enters the public proposal record.

Private channels may coordinate logistics. They may not create decisions nobody can see.

This rule exists because of an observable pattern in adjacent fields:

private coordination
    → public appearance of independent agreement
        → vague claims that "the ecosystem agreed"
            → authorship relationships nobody can see

This project denies that pattern any formal force by construction — not by promising to behave, but by making the private version count for nothing.

8. AI in these channels

Per VOTING.md §10: summaries link their sources, are labelled as generated, are correctable, never replace the record, never vote, and never establish consensus.

An AI summary of a discussion is Plane B convenience material until a human moves its content into Plane A under their own name. See AI-USE.md.

See also: GOVERNANCE.md §14 — the same rule, stated as governance · SECURITY.md §5 — how to report a vulnerability · CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md — conduct in every plane