arch(standards): open standards audit and contribution strategy — Phase B pre-build gate

[Argocyte]

Context

Phase B introduces federation, DID-based identity, and inter-cooperative trust. Several open standards are directly relevant to this work but no issue tracks a formal audit or contribution strategy. This is a pre-build gate — Phase B should not begin building federation or identity components without completing this review.

Relevant standards and communities:

• W3C DID / Verifiable Credentials — legacy/backend/diplomacy/ contains VC verification logic; docs/plan.md describes DID-based identity; issue feat(identity): Migration path from Authentik SSO to DID-based self-sovereign identity #83 tracks SSO→DID migration but not the standards alignment
• ICN Federation Specifications — the federation protocol is described in docs/ and legacy/backend/federation/ but not audited against ICN specs
• Metagov Gateway — referenced in the NLNet application as an integration target; nothing in the codebase or issues describes what this integration looks like
• ActivityPub — used for regulatory updates in the genesis boot sequence design; not audited for compliance
• Valueflows/REA — see issues feat(ops-data): Adopt ValueFlows/REA field names in labour_log and economic event payloads #118 and feat(ontology): Create valueflows-context.jsonld for JSON-LD economic event anchoring #119 for implementation-level alignment; the broader question of Iskander as a Valueflows-compatible platform needs design-level framing here

Scope

1. Audit current contract/protocol architecture against each standard above
2. Identify gaps, conflicts, and alignment opportunities
3. Produce a contribution strategy: where Iskander should contribute to upstream standards vs. profile/extend them
4. Output: a design document in docs/ that serves as the Phase B standards baseline

Acceptance criteria

• Each relevant standard reviewed against current codebase
• Gaps and conflicts documented
• Contribution strategy agreed by the team
• Design document committed to docs/ before Phase B federation work begins

[Argocyte]

Phase C.5 coordination — 2026-04-11

Declaring Phase C.5 Q1 schema-freeze hard dependency: the ops-data service PR (#135) requires the preliminary standards matrix from this issue before the schema is frozen.