software_governance

The normative platform surface — what a conforming PGC system is allowed to be.

Every governed behavior in a PGC composition resolves, eventually, against a declaration in this repository. It holds the constitutions, invariants, structures, schemas, surface contracts, reserved vocabulary, and the neutral capability transforms and side effects that no single domain owns and every domain depends on.

It is declaration first: constitutions, invariants, structures, schemas and vocabulary that the sibling toolchain reads. It also carries the capability transform and side-effect implementation modules a sealed snapshot binds by fully qualified module path at execution — the only executable code here, and it exists because a snapshot names it.

Install

pip install pgc-governance

This package carries declarations and the implementation modules a sealed snapshot binds at execution. It provides no command of its own — the toolchain packages read it.

Where it fits

A composition is assembled from repositories that each own one concern:

software_governance    the normative surface every composition rests on   (this repo)
conformance_workloads  workloads that prove conformance
business_domains       domains built on the surface

protocol_compiler      source      → compiled projections
snapshot_assembler     projections → assembled snapshot
protocol_runtime       snapshot    → execution
snapshot_inspector     snapshot    → inspection

This repo is the floor of that stack. A domain does not import it — a domain resolves against it, and the compiler is what performs the resolution. If a reference in any domain fails to resolve, either the platform is missing an artifact or the domain leaked one it should have declared itself.

A platform is a composition, never a repository. A Profiled Normative Platform is this surface plus selected workloads plus an optional business domain, per a conformance profile. There are as many platforms as there are profiles.

What it holds

Artifacts declare namespaces of the form fb.<concern> — structure::STRUCTURE_IDENTITY_V0, authority::…. fb is a federation boundary: a declaration that a distinct governance authority has jurisdiction over a named set of protocol semantics. It is not a folder, a package, or a deployment unit — see registry/federation/constitutions/CONSTITUTION_FEDERATION_BOUNDARY_V0.md. Domains declare their own namespaces (blockchain::, book_library_mgmt::) and never declare into a platform boundary.

What binds a contributor

Identity is declared, not located. An artifact's namespace comes from the fqdn: key in its own ## Machine block, never from the directory it sits in. The registry is organised one directory per namespace, so the correspondence is currently one-to-one — a navigation convenience, not the source of identity. A file may move without changing what the artifact is.

No code, ever. Normative declarations only: .md protocol source and .json schemas. A directory that would hold .py does not belong in this repository. The compiler, assembler, runtime and inspector that read this surface are siblings, and none of them is vendored here.

Immutable within a spec version. A domain extends the platform by adding artifacts in its own namespace; it never modifies one here. A behavior change is a new version, never an in-place edit.

A namespace is an ownership boundary. Create one only for a first-class concern that can evolve independently and owns a coherent contract — never because several artifacts happen to reference the same artifact kind.

How completeness is verified

The surface is complete and self-supporting iff the external compiler compiles it to a closed snapshot — every reference resolves, zero unresolved FQDNs. Nothing inside this repository can establish that, which is the point: the engine is pointed at the surface and never lives inside it.

protocol_compiler/compile.sh <this repo>

Then diff the resulting closure against doc/GOVERNANCE_SURFACE_MAP.md §6. An unresolved reference is either a missing platform artifact or a leaked domain reference — resolved by adding the former or moving the latter into the domain that owns it.

License

See LICENSE and NOTICE.

The package family

pip install protocol-governed-computing brings in the whole family.

Installing the toolchain is one of two steps. The compiler resolves the governance surface from PGC_PLATFORM_ROOT — fail-hard, cwd-independent, zero inference — so the declarations come from a repository you point at, never from a wheel. A registry inside a package would be a second governance surface competing with the repository's, and a build could then be governed by a stale copy.

git clone https://github.com/protocol-governed-computing/software_governance
export PGC_PLATFORM_ROOT=$PWD/software_governance
pgc            # reports what is installed and whether the anchor resolves

PGC_BUILD_ROOT (compiled output, keeping the governance repo read-only) and PGC_DOMAIN_ROOTS (additional domains contributing their own registry/structures) are optional.

Versioning. Two schemes, and the published version follows the second.

• Internal — each repository's VERSION file, a monotonic composition ordinal. PGC versions the composition rather than each repo: they release together and the governance closure forces lockstep, so the ordinal names which composition a repo belongs to. Development happens on dev/<N> and each cycle is tagged release-<N>. This is not published.
• Public — PUBLIC_VERSION, tagged on every component repository. The platform is at v3.

The published version is the public one: v3 is 3.0.0. The standard the packages implement is a separate artifact on its own track and is not this number.

The standard these packages implement is published separately: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22150616