Hexagonal Licensing Protocol v1.0 — Comprehensive Specification for Distributed Contributor Infrastructure

The Hexagonal Licensing Protocol is the archive’s specification for distributed contributor infrastructure.

Its purpose is to preserve collaborator work that otherwise remains in group chats, shared documents, video platforms, audio services, or messages without durable identifiers, machine-readable provenance, or an explanation of what the work does.

Seven design principles govern the protocol: ease over elegance; provenance as the purpose; framing as the highest-value layer; agent-agnostic but capability-specific execution; fallbacks rather than abortive failures; probabilistic judgment rather than rigid bureaucracy; and contributor retention of copyright and moral rights.

Every contributor license combines three layers:

• Contributor Agreement: identity, authorized scope, retained rights, archive permissions, revision and revocation rules, and approval rights.
• Operator Protocol: file wrapping, critical framing, hex assignment, metadata, relations, API deposit, registry updates, and fallbacks.
• Venue Schedule: permitted publication venues, editorial requirements, prefixes, and standing relations.

Contributor identity is fixed per license to prevent provenance drift. Each authorized position receives a hex-address system with independent venue sequences.

The central editorial requirement is the framing. The operator must read the work and write specific critical prose about form, tone, structure, archive relation, and significance. Generic summary, reused language, sanitization, and voice replacement are prohibited.

Version 2.0 strengthens this through Generous Analytical Treatment: the operator should develop implications, identify the strongest claims, and engage the contributor’s intelligence at full capacity while preserving the work’s voice.

The protocol also defines fixed anchors, discovered relations, archive-scanning autonomy, contributor registries, API operations, review options, and graceful degradation when secondary systems fail. The deposit itself remains the priority.