Operating Obligation Model
Purpose
The fourth Blueprint column is society's and the products' licence to operate. It contains laws, regulation, contracts, standards, norms, user expectations, and public commitments. These inputs are orthogonal to the nine internal semantic hubs: they constrain the system, but they do not become a tenth hub.
Canonical chain
external source or product commitment
-> applicability decision
-> Operating Obligation record
-> Idea interpretation
-> required Behaviour
-> Implementation / Infra control
-> Suite / Test / runtime assurance
-> Anomaly / Event / Journal / recovery and review
Every arrow is traceable in both directions. An external text is not executable by itself, and a control is not justified merely because it exists.
Source classes
| Class | Examples | Authority |
|---|---|---|
| Binding | Law and regulation | Competent legal/product authority determines applicability |
| Contractual | Customer, supplier, or platform contract | Contract owner and accountable product owner |
| Normative | Standard, industry norm, accessibility or security expectation | Product owner records adoption and scope |
| Committed | Public promise or explicit product constraint | Product owner |
Unknown applicability stays open. Agents may collect sources and structure questions; they do
not make a legal conclusion or product commitment without the named authority.
One source, one record, several projections
The Git-backed obligation record is canonical. The fourth Blueprint column, Wiki pages, Ops controls, QA coverage, Status explanations, contributor checklists, and agent task packets are projections. FalkorDB may accelerate traversal but is never an authoring source.
The machine schema is careervector.operating-obligation/v1 in
architecture/operating-obligations.ts. Agents may consume the read-only register at
/api/wiki/operating-obligations.json and its adjacent .schema.json endpoint. See
Operating Obligation Record.
Product extensions
- JobCache Obligations specializes corpus claims, provenance, publication, customer contract, service, and commercial separation.
- CareerVector Commitments specializes permanent zero user cost, private workspace, agency, honest AI, BYOK, Local AI, contribution, accessibility, and collaboration.
- Shared obligations belong here only when their applicability and controls truly cross products.
Acceptance evidence
- No applicable obligation lacks a source, owner, interpretation, required behaviour, and assurance plan.
- Every
as-builtcontrol links Implementation or Infra and Test or runtime evidence. - Every user-facing commitment has a prohibited outcome and an honest failure behaviour.
- Every obligation is queryable from its source, affected module, behaviour, control, test, anomaly, incident, or review.
Open decisions
- Initial jurisdiction and role assessments.
- Legal review workflow and source-update monitoring.
- Retention rules for legal advice versus public source citations.
- Which obligation changes block release automatically.