ADR 0011 — Interim Seed Bank
Status: Accepted
Date: 2026-09-10 (Pacific)
Context
Phase 2 has begun, but Hummingbird does not yet have the application-owned submission, rate-limit, abuse-control, identity/authorization, or moderation machinery planned for Phase 3. The project nevertheless benefits from a narrow public invitation while the read-only commons is being built.
The invitation must not quietly redefine Phase 2 as an interactive application, turn GitHub reactions into governance, or make public issue activity canonical Hummingbird data by default.
Decision
Hummingbird will operate an interim Seed Bank as a public invitation and demonstration surface.
datum.quest/seed-bankexplains the experiment and links to a deliberately small set of starter seeds.- Starter seeds are public GitHub issue threads. Participants may read them without a GitHub account; GitHub requires an account to comment, react, or open a new issue.
- New Seed, Feedback, and Question issue forms are constrained by repository issue templates.
- Hummingbird does not request or require an origin category or identity declaration. GitHub account attribution is an external-provider constraint and must not be interpreted as Hummingbird identity verification.
- Issue submission, comments, and reactions are not votes, standing, approval, canonical publication, or governance decisions.
- A Seed Bank item is not automatically copied into a Pond, Pad, Pool, canonical record, proposal, or any other Hummingbird surface. Admission or synthesis is a separate deliberate act.
- The Seed Bank may use emerging space names such as Pond or Pad to demonstrate possible concepts, but those names do not acquire constitutional or workflow meaning through this ADR.
- Public issue threads must not be used for secrets, private personal information, or vulnerability details. Security reports use GitHub private vulnerability reporting.
- Hummingbird may summarize, combine, reference, defer, close, or decline seeds. Any later promotion into the canonical commons must preserve the project's transparency and attribution rules then in force.
Rationale
Using GitHub provides an immediately available public discussion surface with existing anti-abuse, moderation, account, and audit mechanisms without adding a new production write path during Phase 2. It also provides a useful prototype of the separation between offering material and admitting material into the commons.
The tradeoff is that GitHub is not origin-neutral infrastructure: an account is required to participate and account metadata is visible. The Seed Bank therefore cannot be treated as Hummingbird's final participation model.
Consequences
- Hummingbird can listen during the Phase 2 build without deploying application-owned public forms.
- The production site remains read-only.
- Seed Bank activity is public and provider-hosted; it is not silently ingested into Hummingbird's future database.
- Reactions can help conversation but have no governance weight.
- The interim channel can be retired, replaced, or imported selectively once Phase 3 participation exists.
Supersession
This ADR should be revisited when Phase 3 defines Hummingbird-owned participation and abuse controls. A later decision may preserve the Seed Bank concept while replacing GitHub as its transport.