TELOS: Nondominium

Vision

A protocol for resource governance without ownership. Resources participate in Nondominium Object (NDO) lifecycles where rights and responsibilities attach to relationships, not to titles. The goal is infrastructure for commons-based economies that cannot be re-enclosed — not by platform operators, not by nation-states, and not by the project's own developers.

Mission

Build and ship the Holochain hApp and underlying protocol that demonstrates governance-embedded commons management at production scale. Integrate with hREA for ValueFlows semantics. Provide an incremental adoption path so existing organizations (Sensorica, Dolibarr/TikiWiki users, OVN-aligned cooperatives) can participate without wholesale migration.

Philosophy

  • Protocol-level economic enforcement over policy-level. CAL-1.0 + AGPLv3 dual license with protocol-level constraints (no re-enclosure, no revocation of nondominium status) baked into governance rules, not documents.
  • Three-layer progressive model. Prima Materia (potential, Layer 0) → Specified (designed, Layer 1) → Custodial/Process (instantiated, Layer 2). Coordination overhead matches social complexity; no pre-classification at creation.
  • Private Participation Receipts (PPR) as user-sovereign reputation primitive. 16 categories, bilaterally signed, stored as Holochain private entries. No global scoring aggregator, no third-party visibility by default.
  • Composability with hREA and ValueFlows, not replacement. NDO entries bridge to hREA's EconomicResource/Agent types. ValueFlows is the canonical action vocabulary.
  • Capability-based security via Holochain capability tokens. Access rights are cryptographically issued, field-level scoped, and expire after 30 days maximum.
  • Agent-centric data model. All data tied to individual agents' source chains. No shared database. DHT is the coordination layer, not the control layer.
  • Embedded governance. Resources carry their own access and transfer rules as GovernanceRule entries on ResourceSpecification. The governance zome is a state-transition operator, not a policy server.

Operating Principles for the AI

  • Prefer correctness over cleverness. This is governance infrastructure for real economic relationships. A wrong validation rule on the DHT cannot be rolled back.
  • ValueFlows vocabulary is canonical. If a concept exists in VF (EconomicEvent, Commitment, Claim, VfAction), use VF terminology. Do not invent parallel ontologies.
  • The NDO architecture in documentation/requirements/ndo_prima_materia.md is load-bearing. Changes to the three-layer model, capability slots, or lifecycle state machine ripple through governance, PPR, and UI. Flag any proposal that touches this document's scope and note the downstream impact.
  • PPR must remain user-sovereign. Resist any design that aggregates reputation into global scores, centralizes storage, or enables third-party visibility without explicit capability grant.
  • UI work uses Svelte 5 runes, UnoCSS, and Melt UI next-gen (melt). Not shadcn. Not Tailwind utility classes directly in templates. Not Svelte 4 reactive statements ($:). Check the mcp__svelte MCP server for current Svelte 5 API.
  • Consult REVIEW.md before proposing PR-shaped changes. It explicitly lists patterns to flag. If your proposed code matches a flagged pattern, explain why it is safe before proceeding.
  • Read CONTRIBUTING.md for branch model and commit conventions (feat/, fix/, refactor/, docs/, chore/ prefixes; Conventional Commits scopes).

What This PAI Is NOT For

  • General TypeScript or Rust questions disconnected from Nondominium architecture. Use a generic AI session for language-level questions.
  • Holochain learning content not specific to this codebase. The holochain-agent-skill covers Holochain generally; this TELOS is for Nondominium-specific decisions.
  • Personal or spiritual contexts. Use a personal-level AI session.
  • Speculation about post-MVP integrations (Unyt, Flowsta) without first reading their integration docs in documentation/requirements/post-mvp/.