How it works
Hummingbird is being built in phases, starting with durable institutional boundaries before broader application-owned interaction.
Lifecycle of an offer
You do not need to understand the database or repository to participate. The important distinction is that offering something, Hummingbird remembering it, and Hummingbird publishing it are separate actions.
- Offer. A first-party experimental offer, seed, comment, question, correction, critique, proposal, or other offered material exists. It is not automatically Hummingbird memory.
- Consider. The offer may be discussed, challenged, combined, summarized, deferred, declined, or routed toward the process appropriate to what it would change.
- Admit. If Hummingbird deliberately decides the meaning belongs in durable canonical memory, a bounded canonical record is created. Provider metadata or temporary offer state is not automatically copied with it.
- Publish. Publication is a separate decision. A canonical record can exist without being publicly released.
- Trace consequence. Published records can later be referenced, corrected, superseded, withdrawn, or archived without silently rewriting history.
An offer can be small or foundational. It might correct a sentence, add evidence, challenge an assumption, propose a new activity or space, recommend a new ADR, suggest a governance or Charter change through the appropriate process, or argue that Hummingbird itself should substantially change. Broad scope is not itself an abuse signal.
What an offer may propose is broad. What authority is required to act on it depends on its consequences. Making an offer does not itself change canonical memory, publication, governance, or project authority.
The first real admission/publication path has already been exercised end-to-end. See the public canonical records for the resulting read model.
Phase progression
Phase 2E is active: Hummingbird is reviewing Phase 2 evidence and governance gates while running a narrowly bounded first-party experimental ingress pilot. Phase 2D's production recovery proof is complete; one ordinary independent private-backup checkpoint remains.
Phase 3 still requires its constitutional, governance, security, and runtime gates to be resolved and an explicit authorization decision. ADR 0017 permits only one evidence-gathering exception before then: the live first-party offer path may write to temporary, non-canonical experimental state, but it cannot create accounts, durable participant capabilities, formal governance standing, automatic admission, automatic publication, or broader institutional write authority.
- Phase 0 — Foundation (complete). Repository, documentation, minimal site, CI, deployment.
- Phase 1 — Public Charter Site (complete). Mission, working Charter, governance, transparency, public repository, security baseline, and supporting project surfaces.
- Phase 2 — Read-only commons + bounded evidence gathering (current). Canonical persistence, explicit admission/publication boundaries, static public projections, and production-state recovery are proven. The Phase 2E temporary non-canonical offer experiment is open while the remaining review/gate work continues.
- Phase 3 — Controlled participation. Durable participant capabilities and broader Hummingbird-owned write authority may begin only after the applicable constitutional, governance, security, and runtime gates are resolved and Phase 3 is explicitly authorized.
- Phase 4 — Governance workflows. Proposals, disputes, validated needs, decisions.
- Phase 5 — Financial support. Donations and transparent expenditure, only after the needs process works, and never in exchange for influence.
The live Phase 2E pilot uses a simple low-friction path and temporary Offer Buffer. Later delivery choices may change pacing, quota, or resource cost, but they must not classify participant origin or become hidden content priority, reputation, or governance weight.
Making an offer, publication, canonical admission, alteration of history, and governance authority are separate capabilities. Early pilots constrain the state-changing side rather than putting the public commons behind an identity or browser gate.
The Seed Bank demonstrated the separation early: offering something is not the same as admitting it into the commons. GitHub issues, comments, and reactions remain provider-hosted discussion unless a deliberate process creates a Hummingbird record from them. The live first-party Phase 2E pilot tests the same boundary with much lower entry friction.
Every technical and institutional decision of consequence should leave a trail. Hummingbird's public Decision Record exposes the Architecture Decision Records that explain why major paths were chosen, what alternatives were rejected, and what consequences were accepted.