Context Graph Protocol governance

This document describes how the Context Graph Protocol is maintained, how it changes, and the path from contextgraph/1.0-draft to a frozen contextgraph/1.0. It exists so adopters can trust that the protocol is maintained deliberately and that "Context Graph Protocol conformant" is a stable, verifiable claim — not a maintainer's mood.

Roles

• Maintainer. Mac Anderson (@macanderson) is the current maintainer. The maintainer owns release decisions, approval of normative changes, and the call on when contextgraph/1.0-draft freezes to contextgraph/1.0.
• Contributors. Anyone. Contributions land via pull request under the DCO — no CLA, no copyright assignment.

Context Graph Protocol is maintainer-led today, not committee-led — deliberately. A steering committee before there are independent implementations is theater. The path to broader governance is defined below and is triggered by adoption, not ambition.

What counts as a normative change

A change is normative — it affects the protocol version or the conformance contract — if it does any of the following:

• adds, removes, or renames a field in the wire types (contextgraph-types);
• changes a field's required-ness or its serialized name;
• adds or tightens a conformance requirement;
• changes the version-compatibility rule; or
• changes the envelope vocabulary or framing.

A change is non-normative if it only touches host internals, documentation, error messages, ergonomics, or tests. Non-normative changes need no protocol version bump.

How a normative change lands

1. Proposal. Open an issue describing the change, the use case it unlocks, and the alternatives considered. Normative changes are not drive-by.
2. Discussion. The maintainer and contributors weigh it against the seven guarantees and the stability promise. A change that silently breaks a deployed provider is rejected unless it justifies a new major family.
3. Implementation. A pull request implements it, updates this spec and CHANGELOG.md under [Unreleased], and adds or updates a witness — a conformance check or a wire example in examples/.
4. Decision. The maintainer approves or closes. While pre-1.0, the maintainer is the decision authority; after the freeze, normative changes within the contextgraph/1 family are additive-only and additive changes SHOULD land without objection.

The bias is additive, not breaking. A new optional field is a minor change; a removed or renamed field requires a new major family (contextgraph/2).

The path to contextgraph/1.0

contextgraph/1.0-draft freezes to contextgraph/1.0 when all of the following are true:

• Independent implementations. At least two independent Context Graph Protocol implementations pass the conformance suite against the reference host. One reference implementation plus one genuine third-party implementation is the minimum; the point is to prove the spec is buildable without the reference code.
• Stabilization window. The wire surface has had no normative change for at least 60 days.
• No blocking normative issues. There are no open normative issues the maintainer considers blocking.
• Complete enforcement. The conformance suite's checks are agreed to fully enforce the documented conformance requirements.

At the freeze, the -draft suffix is dropped, the crates move to 1.0.0 in lockstep, and the major-family compatibility rule guarantees that already-deployed 1.0-draft providers keep handshaking successfully — no flag day. See stability.md.

Governance evolution

When Context Graph Protocol has a healthy base of independent providers and hosts, the maintainer intends to transition from a single maintainer to a small group of maintainers drawn from independent implementers, with the conformance suite as the neutral arbiter of "conformant." The trigger is adoption, not a calendar date. Until then, the single-maintainer + public-PR + DCO model keeps the barrier to contribution low and the spec coherent.

Scope

Context Graph Protocol specifies context retrieval: typed, budgeted, provenance-carrying, consent-gated, conformance-verified frames that a host composes into a prompt. It does not specify tool invocation — that is MCP's scope — and will not absorb it. An agent that needs both composes them: Context Graph Protocol frames feed the prompt, MCP tools do the work. See "How Context Graph Protocol relates to MCP".