Living Document Notice
Published 2026-09-17. The evolving architecture, revisions, and connected notes for this dispatch live in the Stax Digital Garden.
The Ten-Year Personal Relationship Architecture
Summary
Commercial software platforms vanish, but human relationships span decades. Yeoman articulates the plain-text longevity standard for personal knowledge management, ensuring that personal contact archives remain readable, parseable, and sovereign for over a quarter-century.
The Decadal Perspective on Personal Computing
Software life cycles are notoriously ephemeral. Cloud CRM providers pivot, raise subscription pricing, get acquired, or shut down entirely. An individual who began tracking their network in 2010 has likely endured multiple forced migrations across proprietary tools, losing notes, timestamps, and relational context with each transition.
Yeoman is engineered under the assumption that the operator will live, work, and maintain relationships for another fifty years. The only medium proven to survive across multiple decades of computing history is UTF-8 plain text.
The Decadal Longevity Horizon:
1990: Plain Text ASCII / Maildir
│ (Still 100% Readable Today)
▼
2026: Yeoman Markdown Dossiers + YAML Frontmatter
│ (Standard File Formats, Zero Binary Blobs)
▼
2056: Future Computing Substrates
(Zero Emulation Required; Plain Text Invariant)
The Four Ten-Year Architectural Standards
Yeoman adheres to four design pillars that protect the archive from technological obsolescence:
1. The Human-Readability Floor
Even if every compiler, Python interpreter, and SQLite index vanishes from the earth, any human with a standard text viewer must be able to open ada-lovelace.md and immediately understand the person’s identity, communication channels, and recent history.
2. Disposable Secondary Indices
All SQLite databases, search indices, and vector embeddings are secondary caches. The authoritative state resides 100% in the Markdown files on disk. If the database file is deleted or corrupted, a single rebuild command reconstructs the entire graph in under five seconds:
# Rebuild all Yeoman contact graphs from raw vault Markdown files
bosun index rebuild --realm yeoman3. Open Standards Over Custom DSLs
Yeoman rejects bespoke binary formats. Schemas use standard JSON Schema Draft 2020-12; identifiers use RFC 9562 UUIDv7; network protocols use JSON-RPC 2.0; timestamps use ISO 8601 UTC.
4. Zero Cryptographic Lock-In
While sensitive fields support redaction and hashing, contact files remain standard unencrypted text on encrypted filesystems (such as LUKS, FileVault, or BitLocker), avoiding proprietary vault encryption wrappers that break standard Unix tools.
Architectural Roadmap for Realm 02
As Yeoman scales across the Bosun ecosystem, development proceeds along three strategic milestones:
| Phase | Milestone | Objective | Target |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phase 1 | Core PRM Ledger | Markdown dossiers, cadence decay, stdio JSON-RPC | Active |
| Phase 2 | Graph Transclusion | Dynamic 1-on-1 agendas, Trice task delegation | Q4 2026 |
| Phase 3 | P2P Sovereign Sync | End-to-end encrypted identity exchange over Matrix | 2027 |
The ultimate goal of Yeoman is not to turn friendships into spreadsheets, but to provide a quiet, dependable, sovereign instrument that honors our commitments to the human beings who share our journey.
- Directus Target: yeoman
- Garden Source Reference: MOC - Bosun PKM Tools, MOC - Fleet Operations
- Garden Source Reference: [YMN-1010 - The Ten-Year Personal Relationship Architecture](YMN-1010 - The Ten-Year Personal Relationship Architecture)