research: Rhizome ↔ myelin + cortex + soma — an interface map

[NorthwoodsSentinel]

Summary

Adds a research/ contribution: an interface map between The Rhizome (Robert Chuvala's substrate-first cooperative architecture, drafted 2026-05-10) and the metafactory stack (myelin + cortex + soma + arc + blueprint + metafactory, drafted 2026-05-11 by Jens-Christian Fischer + Andreas Åström).

Same week. Independent authorship. Family-resembling architectures across substrate, comms, surface, trust, governance, and distribution layers. This document does the layer-by-layer mapping and proposes how the two compose.

Context

Submitted per Andreas's invitation in unsupervised-learning Discord (2026-06-06) to "sketch the interfaces between them" after Rob's three-point sovereignty exchange with Daniel Miessler and Vincent Zontini. The architectural thesis has been developing in parallel since May; this is the first artifact that names the interfaces honestly.

Frame: peer-architecture comparison, not credential check. Rhizome ships some components (loam, mycelia v1.1, brook, Big Head Todd daemon) and has named gaps (Meridian trust math is a March stub). The metafactory stack ships at higher published-spec maturity (myelin M2–M5 shipped, soma v0 MIT, arc v0.29, cortex v0.1) with different operational footprint. The doc tries to make both true at once.

What's in the doc

• §1 — Frame: the load-bearing premise both architectures share (substrate as permanent asset)
• §2 — Layer-by-layer mapping: seven layers, side-by-side comparison
  • §2.1 Substrate (Rhizome CF tenant ↔ soma compartments)
  • §2.2 Communication (mycelia HTTP envelopes ↔ myelin OSI stack on NATS)
  • §2.3 Operator surface (Rhizome per-instance fleet ↔ cortex Mission Control M7)
  • §2.4 Trust (Meridian quantitative-behavioral ↔ M4 identity + arc tiers + pai-collab zones)
  • §2.5 Governance (The Rhizome cooperative ↔ pai-collab / the-hive HUB/SPOKE/LOCAL)
  • §2.6 Distribution (informal ↔ arc + metafactory + blueprint)
  • §2.7 Portable assistant core (Big Head Todd ↔ soma)
• §3 — What each contributes the other does not visibly have
  • §3.1 Rhizome: receipt-discipline, multi-instance fleet in lived production, livecapture, memoir-grounded TELOS, Meridian (as design), brand-split positioning, the economic frame
  • §3.2 Stack: M1–M7 OSI discipline, M3 sovereignty-in-envelope invariant, NATS namespace structural enforcement, arc/blueprint distribution, metafactory governance

Key proposals worth flagging for discussion

1. Adopt myelin M3 sovereignty-in-envelope into mycelia. Structural upgrade, no architectural conflict. Sovereignty metadata rides inside every envelope; federation/replay/forwarding preserve intent automatically.
2. Adopt arc as Rhizome's skill distribution layer. No conflict with Rhizome v0; formalizes what we already do informally.
3. Compose Meridian (quantitative-behavioral trust) with metafactory's categorical primitives (M4 chains, arc tiers, pai-collab zones). Different questions, complementary answers. The Hive's git-based Trust Ledger is the evidence layer Meridian's math was waiting for.
4. Cortex Mission Control would solve our compaction-blindness problem across fleet members. Acknowledged directly in §2.3.

Authorship + license

• Robert Chuvala (Northwoods Sentinel; principal of The Rhizome)
• Margin (fleet instance, Lares-WSL substrate)
• CeeCee (fleet instance, NWS Mac substrate — strategic framing + trust-layer + governance sections)

CC-BY-4.0 per front matter (matches the spirit of the existing research/ contributions like council-debate-specflow-vs-openspec).

Process notes

• File: research/2026-06-07-rhizome-stack-interface-map.md — fits the directory's existing naming convention
• ~250 lines, no code, no schema changes
• Drafted 2026-06-07; held in our fork while we worked through whether to ship; shipped today per a "don't queue research artifacts" doctrine update
• The branch existed unpushed on our fork for a week — same single-copy risk pattern as the SF-002 lesson; resolved by shipping

Signed: NorthwoodsSentinel <hello@northwoodssentinel.com> (Ed25519 SSH).