Governance & Stewardship
Governance is how a nest keeps its AI-readable surface trustworthy. Every document moves through a review lifecycle, and only approved content is ever readable by an agent. Stewards review submissions within a defined scope, prime documents force steward approval regardless of author, and deletions run through their own authority-gated queue. This page covers the lifecycle, steward scoping, the review and deletion queues, and self-serve drafts.
Lifecycle
Documents move through a defined status lifecycle:
draft → pending_review → approved / rejected
Only approved content is AI-readable. Drafts and pending documents are invisible to agents until a steward approves them. See Status Lifecycle for the underlying model.
Prime documents
Prime documents force steward review no matter who authored them:
- A
primeflag can be set by an owner or admin on a document. - A nest can define
prime_tags; any document carrying one of those tags is treated as prime.
Prime content always requires steward approval, closing the gap where a trusted author might otherwise self-approve high-stakes content.
Steward scoping
Stewards are assigned by scope, and precedence runs from most specific to least specific:
document → tag → nest → owner
| Scope | Applies to |
|---|---|
| Document | A single document |
| Tag | All documents carrying a tag |
| Nest | The whole nest |
| Owner | Fallback authority |
A document-scoped steward takes precedence over a tag-scoped one, which takes precedence over a nest-scoped one, which takes precedence over the owner as final fallback.
Review queue
Submissions land in a review queue that stewards work from:
| Action | Tool / endpoint |
|---|---|
| List the queue | context_review_queue |
| Submit for review | context_submit_review |
| Approve | context_approve |
| Reject | context_reject (requires a note) |
A rejection must carry a note, so authors always get a reason.
Request-deletion
Deletion is authority-gated and separate from the review queue:
- Flagging a document for deletion was tightened from anyone-flags to EDITOR+ authority.
- Folder-level and nest-level deletion flags require a nest-scope steward row.
- The owner or admin decides on deletion requests.
| Action | Tool / endpoint |
|---|---|
| Deletion queue | context_deletion_queue |
| Resolve a deletion request | context_resolve_deletion |
Self-serve drafts
Authors can see their own in-flight drafts without steward tooling:
| Surface | Tool / endpoint |
|---|---|
| My drafts (UI) | /me/drafts |
| My drafts (MCP) | context_my_drafts |
Related
- Status Lifecycle — the status model behind approval.
- Folders — folder-scoped stewardship and deletion.
Sources
- PromptOwl/contextnest-community PRs: #195, #192 (plus the v1.17 tightening), #107-governance;
STEWARDSHIP.md.
Related pages
- Remote & Governed NestsA nest does not have to live on your local disk. ContextNest can register remote nests and route reads and writes to them over MCP — the same ctx commands…
- Status LifecycleEvery document in a nest carries a status that governs where it is in its life and whether retrieval can see it. ContextNest uses a five-state lifecycle —…
- Folders in a Hosted NestFolders give a hosted nest a nested, hierarchical structure. You can organize documents into folders at any depth, list a folder tree with per-folder…
- Publishing a NestPublishing makes a nest readable — to people, to agents, and to external systems that mirror it. You control read access with a public/private visibility…
- Agent Framework ConnectorsConnectors are Apache-2.0, arm's-length outbound clients that let agent frameworks read governed context from a hosted Community Nest over its public REST…