The term
Because this term is defined in an authoritative policy, the cell does not propose its meaning. The definition is trusted at confidence: 1.00 with origin: decreed. What the cell decides — and what Steward review packets exist to govern — is publication scope: which downstream consumers may use this definition, and under what conditions.
Publication scope decisions
Each consumer receives an explicit in / out / conditional decision with reason. The default is never "publish everywhere." Auto-publish to fleet for a high-risk class is blocked at the schema level. Approval requires web-authenticated channel and Legal counter-sign.
| Consumer | Decision | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| fleet:incident-router | Allowed | Needs the formal definition to route per policy. |
| fleet:executive-brief | Allowed | Leadership reporting must use the formal definition. |
| fleet:regulatory-filing | Allowed | Regulator-facing artifacts require the authoritative definition. |
| fleet:customer-support | Blocked | Formal regulatory term will confuse customer-facing tone. |
| fleet:standup-summary | Blocked | Daily standup usage is colloquial; importing the formal term would force engineers to either avoid the word or misuse it. |
| lake:operations-partition | Conditional | Match only when accompanied by incident-context terms; confidence threshold 0.85. |
| lake:regulatory-partition | Conditional | High-precision matching with audit logging; confidence threshold 0.90. |
Derived classification rule (data lake)
| Rule ID | rule-material-incident-001 |
| Match | text contains "material incident" |
| Conditions | any_of: ["service disruption", "regulatory", "financial loss", "incident report"] source_class: in ["incident_report", "exec_brief", "regulatory_filing"], not_in ["standup_note"] |
| Confidence | 0.85 |
| Classification | tags: regulated-incident-reference, compliance-policy-4.2 · security_class: internal · retention: 7y · audit_required: true |
| Derived from | term_material_incident@v1 |
| Retroactive sweep | 312 historical documents classified in the operations partition. |
The rule is evidence-aware and confidence-aware. A bare text match is insufficient. Without the context conditions, the lake would over-classify colloquial usage in engineering standups. With them, the rule fires only in genuinely regulatory contexts.
The drift finding
The cell's Reconciler ran across 90 days of engineering communication and observed that "material incident" is used in standups for things that do not meet the policy's three criteria — failed CI runs, code review comments, minor production hiccups. Observed compliance with the formal definition: 34 percent.
What happens next is the critical design choice. The cell does not silently update the canonical definition to match observed practice. The policy is authoritative; the lexicon stays aligned to it. Instead, the cell emits a governance finding:
The finding routes to T:3 governance with a tracked_action_id. If the organization never acts on the finding, the cell aggregates that into a meta-finding ("governance is not consuming our outputs"). That is how the system surfaces its own ineffectiveness. It does not quietly absorb the drift to make itself look useful.
Audit trail
Every state transition emits an append-only event. Below is the exact sequence for this term's promotion and the subsequent drift detection.
Source corpus. KAiM representative pilot · Compliance Policy 4.2 plus 90 days of engineering standup transcripts. Synthetic but structurally realistic.
Cell version. v1.0 · Schemas canonical-term@v1, review-packet-publication@v1, classification-rule@v1.
Approval authority. T:3 director plus Legal counter-sign · web-authenticated channel (Slack publish blocked for legal-relevant class).
Permanent identifier. term_material_incident:v1:2026-05-16T11:00:00Z
Governance finding. track-2026-05-16-material-incident-drift · status: open · routed to T:3 governance.
Standards alignment. NIST AI RMF (Map, Measure, Manage); ISO/IEC 42001 (controls, monitoring, evidence).