Irreducible and generative: nothing else in the project derives them, and most other principles can be traced back to them. If one of these is wrong, the project is wrong.
1
Structural data sovereignty
The user owns their data — both the bytes and the meaning — structurally, not as a promise. Portability written into ownership beats a promise of portability; membrane architecture beats both.
This is the project's answer to who owns what. It generates the membrane abstraction, the cell architecture, the insistence that raw input remain authoritative, and the requirement that no architectural decision foreclose the path to Tier 3. Platform-holds-the-data commitments are conscious tradeoffs against this principle, not defaults.
2
Truth is contested; provenance is not
The system does not claim authority on truth. Knowledge, facts, and meaning are continuously contested and revised — by individuals, by families, by the canonical layer, by history. Remoir's job is to capture what was said, by whom, when, with what confidence, and to surface that transparently. It is not to adjudicate.
The underlying stance: no authority on truth. Wisdom, knowledge, reason, ethics, truth, morality are valued highly because they are continuously being worked on, not because the system can deliver them. This is why raw input must be preserved as authoritative (you cannot redo provenance later) and why every derivation is a re-runnable projection. It is also why family memory takes precedence over canonical fact in the family's own record — the family is the authoritative narrator of its own life, not because family memory is more accurate, but because the system declines to overrule it.
3
Capture friction is the existential constraint
At end-user ingestion, any design that adds steps is rejected on those grounds alone. If capture is not instant and frictionless, nothing else in the system gets to matter, because there will be nothing to operate on.
This generates the "capture now, make sense later" workflow, the "everything is optional at capture time" rule, the photo-primary capture model, and the design veto that complexity must stay invisible to the user. Later phases — editorial, governance — may deliberately introduce friction; this principle scopes to the moment of capture by the end user.
4
Meaning lives in arenas, not coordinates
The unit of meaning in a memoir is the arena (the bounded transformation of a place by what happens in it) — not the GPS pin, the calendar event, the photo file, or any other digitally-determined structure. Geography, time, and media are services to meaning, not the substrate of it.
This generates the Moment as the experiential atom, the threads-vs-tags distinction, the principle that tags grow into threads (and threads into richer objects) through use rather than upfront ontology, and the layered object model. It is the project's rejection of database-shaped thinking about lived experience.
5
Structure emerges from data, not from architectural foresight
Build only the layer the data actually demands. Let proliferation justify each new entity, table, or abstraction. The pull toward modeling completeness is to be resisted; the pull toward additive, minimal structure is to be trusted.
This generates the additive data model, the four-layer object model (where layers reflect how an object came to exist), the tag-graduation principle, the deferred-architecture stance (ADR-001), and the general posture that today's correct abstraction is tomorrow's lock-in if we commit too early. It is epistemic humility applied to the schema rather than to the content.
---