medicine-wheel

Medicine Wheel

An experimental TypeScript framework for relational healing, ceremonial inquiry, and Indigenous-aligned software development — grounded in the Four Directions, the respect, reciprocity and responsibility of Shawn Wilson’s relational accountability (Research Is Ceremony, 2008, p. 99), and OCAP® data sovereignty principles.

[!WARNING] Experimental alpha. APIs change between patch versions, packages appear and their boundaries move, and storage shapes are still settling. Published in the open so the work can be examined and improved — pin exact versions, and read ALPHA.md before depending on any of it.

News

31 published packages: the app, 29 libraries and the MCP server (85 tools over stdio and StreamableHTTP).

Recently landed:

Architecture

@medicine-wheel/ontology-core          ← Foundation (types, schemas, RDF vocabulary)
    ├── @medicine-wheel/ceremony-protocol    ← Ceremony state & governance
    ├── @medicine-wheel/fire-keeper          ← Ceremony coordination agent
    ├── @medicine-wheel/community-review     ← Elder review & consensus
    ├── @medicine-wheel/community-identity   ← People, roles, circles, memberships
    ├── @medicine-wheel/consent-lifecycle    ← Relational consent lifecycle
    ├── @medicine-wheel/narrative-engine     ← Beat sequencing & arc validation
    ├── @medicine-wheel/importance-unit      ← Relational unit of knowledge
    ├── @medicine-wheel/relational-index     ← Four-source epistemic indexing
    ├── @medicine-wheel/transformation-tracker ← Wilson validity tracking
    ├── @medicine-wheel/graph-viz            ← Circular layout & visualization
    ├── @medicine-wheel/relational-query     ← Query, traversal & audit
    ├── @medicine-wheel/prompt-decomposition ← Intent extraction & PDE
    ├── @medicine-wheel/ui-components        ← React components
    ├── @medicine-wheel/client               ← Typed HTTP door to a running wheel
    ├── @medicine-wheel/data-store           ← Shared data access (Redis)
    ├── @medicine-wheel/data-store-postgres  ← PostgreSQL / Neon provider scaffold
    ├── @medicine-wheel/storage-provider     ← Canonical persistence contract (JSONL ⇄ Neon)
    ├── @medicine-wheel/infra                ← Hosts, tenants, services, port bindings as facets
    ├── @medicine-wheel/capabilities         ← What the platform can do, who provides it, who said so
    ├── @medicine-wheel/developer-repository-mapping ← Owner hubs of repository rows; mw-repomap
    ├── @medicine-wheel/honcho               ← The wheel's projection into Honcho, memory that reasons
    ├── @medicine-wheel/perception-layer     ← Witness recordings as typed perceptual events
    ├── @medicine-wheel/narrative-cluster    ← Events → clusters → beats → Film Edit Brief
    ├── @medicine-wheel/ceremonial-diary     ← A participant's voice across the Five Phases
    ├── @medicine-wheel/github-ceremony      ← GitHub webhooks as ceremony beads
    └── @medicine-wheel/session-reader       ← Session event data reader

@medicine-wheel/creative-orientation      ← The question asked before the work
    ├── @medicine-wheel/creative-problem-solving ← Signpost — re-exports the above
    ├── @medicine-wheel/gap-analysis        ← Looks for what is missing; the turn follows
    └── @medicine-wheel/brainstorming       ← Idea → design, through human gates

Is there a prior state you are restoring? Named one: a gap analysis looks for what is missing against it. It can be useful, and it is not part of the creative orientation; after it, the turn keeps its findings as current reality and asks for the desired outcome. Named none: you are creating, and structural tension is the instrument. mw orient "<outcome>" asks it from the command line.

Methodology: RISE Framework

This project utilizes the RISE methodology:

Packages

The sections below introduce the core building blocks. The root package.json workspace list is the current inventory of the full suite.

@medicine-wheel/ontology-core

Core ontology layer — 50+ TypeScript types, Zod validation schemas, RDF vocabulary (6 custom namespaces), canonical constants (Ojibwe names, seasons, direction colors), and semantic query helpers (Wilson alignment, OCAP® compliance, relational traversal).

@medicine-wheel/ceremony-protocol

Ceremony lifecycle protocol — manages ceremony state, four-phase transitions (opening → council → integration → closure), governance enforcement for protected paths, and ceremony-required change detection.

@medicine-wheel/fire-keeper

Fire Keeper coordination agent — tends the ceremony fire through gating conditions (consent, ceremony phase, trajectory confidence), permission tier escalation, and human decision points; it evaluates, gates, routes, and escalates. It does not measure relational accountability; people judge that (#155).

@medicine-wheel/community-review

Community-based ceremonial review protocol — talking circle protocol, review circles, consensus-seeking and relational accountability assessment, after the community-grounded credibility Wilson describes (Research Is Ceremony, 2008, pp. 121, 125, 131). Its Elder validation step is the package’s own design.

@medicine-wheel/community-identity

Who is in the circle, so a wheel can tell two people apart. A person is a human node with metadata.kind: "person" and a role, a circle is a circle node, membership is a member_of edge. Roles run participant → emerging_guide → ceremony_facilitator → firekeeper → admin, with story_keeper parallel to firekeeper and companion_ai / integration_ai beside them, each carrying a permission map. Invitations, credentials and the audit trail stay with the consumer — hashed, never on the wheel.

@medicine-wheel/consent-lifecycle

Ongoing relational consent lifecycle — consent as a living relational obligation with lifecycle tracking, renewal, renegotiation, withdrawal cascades, and community-level consent protocols.

@medicine-wheel/narrative-engine

Beat sequencing, cadence validation, arc completeness scoring, timeline building, cycle orchestration, and RSIS narrative generators. Tracks four-directional balance and ceremony coverage.

@medicine-wheel/importance-unit

ImportanceUnit — this suite’s relational unit of knowledge, after Wilson’s relational epistemology. Carries epistemic weight, source dimensions (Land/Dream/Code/Vision), circle depth tracking, and accountability links. Dream-state knowledge starts at 0.85+ weight; rational-filtered inputs start lower.

@medicine-wheel/relational-index

Four-source epistemic dimensional indexing — Land, Dream, Code, Vision traversal with cross-dimensional mapping, convergence/tension detection, and spiral depth metrics.

@medicine-wheel/transformation-tracker

Research transformation tracking — built on the lesson Wilson quotes from his co-researchers, “If research doesn’t change you as a person, then you haven’t done it right” (2008, p. 135); the validity check is ours. Tracks researcher growth, community impact, relational shifts, reciprocity balance, and seven-generation sustainability.

@medicine-wheel/graph-viz

Medicine Wheel circular graph visualization — four-direction node positioning, ceremony-aware edges, OCAP® indicators, SVG path generation, data converters, and RSIS visualization utilities (kinship graphs, reciprocity flows, Mermaid export).

@medicine-wheel/relational-query

Query builder for relational webs — node/edge filtering, ceremony-bounded BFS traversal, OCAP®-compliant path walking, accountability auditing, shortest path, neighborhood discovery, and KuzuDB Cypher query builders.

@medicine-wheel/prompt-decomposition

Ontology-enriched prompt decomposition — Four Directions classification, implicit intent extraction from hedging language, dependency mapping, ceremony guidance, action stacking, and narrative beat generation.

@medicine-wheel/ui-components

React UI component library — DirectionCard, BeatTimeline, NodeInspector, OcapBadge, WilsonMeter. All components use ontology-core types for type-safe, culturally grounded interfaces.

@medicine-wheel/client

The typed HTTP door to a running wheel — nodes, edges, ceremonies, beats and the ceremonial diary. The wheel’s paging honesty (count, total, matched, truncated) is carried through to the caller, limit: 'all' asks for the whole store, and errors fail fast: an unreachable wheel throws with status 502, a refusal carries the wheel’s status and body. No retry.

@medicine-wheel/data-store

Shared Redis data-access layer — connection management (Upstash, Vercel KV, local), Node/Edge/Ceremony/Accountability CRUD, session-ceremony linking, and generic Redis helpers.

@medicine-wheel/session-reader

Session event reader — JSONL parsing, session summaries, analytics extraction, and search across agent session data. Zero external dependencies.

@medicine-wheel/storage-provider

The canonical persistence contract. One StorageProvider interface with two first-class equals behind it — a JSONL file store for a project’s .mw/store/ and a Neon (Postgres) store — plus typed relational refusals and the capture, inquiry-weave and plan-perspective registries. The app, the MCP server and every package that persists go through this door.

@medicine-wheel/data-store-postgres

Minimal pg scaffold — shared pool management and provider-ready storage entrypoints. Explicitly not a competing provider architecture; storage-provider owns the contract.

@medicine-wheel/infra

Typed infrastructure facets — hosts, tenants, services and port bindings — keyed by relational node id, with detectPortConflicts over declared ∪ observed state. Types plus one pure function: zero I/O, zero persistence. A running service is registered as a knowledge node carrying metadata.kind: "service", never as a new node type.

@medicine-wheel/capabilities

The platform-features and capabilities layer: a capability rides a knowledge node carrying metadata.kind: "capability", says what it does in at most 55 words, and lists the repositories and services that provide it. Every row carries its attribution (who wrote it, when, from what evidence, and whether a person has read it since), and a model’s row starts pending. findSharedCapabilities names a capability more than one provider gives. Pure.

@medicine-wheel/developer-repository-mapping

Repository mapping: the JSONL rows an owner hub (<owner>/<owner>/.miadi/repository-mapping/) holds, the lifecycle state machine checked against git, a meta hub that reads other hubs without copying them, and the projection into wheel nodes and edges. The mw-repomap CLI makes, validates, observes and serves a mapping on one small web page.

@medicine-wheel/honcho

The wheel’s projection into Honcho, memory that reasons. The wheel stays canonical; Honcho holds what the history has come to mean about each peer. A beat becomes a message from its speaker in the session of its ceremony, a speaker’s evolving representation is recalled before they speak again, and a derived conclusion returns as a knowledge node carrying metadata.kind: "memory_projection" with its status and provenance. Zero dependencies, /v3 only, configured by HONCHO_URL. Nothing is filtered here.

@medicine-wheel/perception-layer

Eyes and ears of agent-supported film production — witness a belt-device recording as typed perceptual events and seed a production knowledge graph.

@medicine-wheel/narrative-cluster

Narrative Cluster Processor — turn witnessed perceptual events or rushes into thematic clusters, direction-aligned narrative beats, and a Film Edit Brief with EDL markers.

@medicine-wheel/ceremonial-diary

A participant’s voice across the Five-Phase ceremonial methodology — intention, observation and reflection entries with pattern detection, statistics, markdown export, and optional projection into the chronicle wheel.

@medicine-wheel/github-ceremony

Witness GitHub webhook events (issues, pull requests, merges, commits) through a ceremonial lens and record them as relational ceremony beads. Pure, framework-free functions over a parsed payload and a storage provider.

@medicine-wheel/creative-orientation

The orientation question, asked before the work: is there a prior state you are restoring? Yes: route to a gap analysis, which looks for what is missing against that state and is not part of the creative orientation; the turn follows it. No: you are creating, route to structural tension. Reads the claim the caller supplies; advises where phrasing and situation disagree, and never refuses.

@medicine-wheel/creative-problem-solving

Signpost package — re-exports @medicine-wheel/creative-orientation and adds THE_QUESTION. Holds no logic of its own. It exists because “creative problem solving” is the name people look for, and a signpost carrying the traveller’s name is how they find the door.

@medicine-wheel/gap-analysis

A gap analysis looks for what is missing: evidenced baseline, observation, difference, verifiable elimination steps. Useful when something worked and stopped (root cause, incidents, regressions, troubleshooting). It is not part of the creative orientation. turnToCreativeOrientation follows the analysis: the findings become current reality (never tasks), the pull to fill each missing item is named, and the desired outcome of a structural tension chart is asked for on its own terms.

@medicine-wheel/brainstorming

Idea into committed design through approval gates a human holds — explore → clarify → approaches → design → spec → review → plan. Every outcome it emits, including its own multiple-choice questions, passes the orientation question before it is spoken.

Specifications

RISE framework specifications are in rispecs/. Start with medicine-wheel.spec.md for the system overview.

Package / topic Spec
System Overview medicine-wheel.spec.md
ontology-core ontology-core.spec.md
ceremony-protocol ceremony-protocol.spec.md
fire-keeper fire-keeper.spec.md
community-review community-review.spec.md
community-identity community-identity.spec.md
consent-lifecycle consent-lifecycle.spec.md
narrative-engine narrative-engine.spec.md · narrative-beats-lifecycle.spec.md
importance-unit importance-unit.spec.md
relational-index relational-index.spec.md
transformation-tracker transformation-tracker.spec.md
graph-viz graph-viz.spec.md
relational-query relational-query.spec.md · relational-web-package.spec.md
prompt-decomposition prompt-decomposition.spec.md · decomposition-strategies.spec.md
ui-components ui-components.spec.md
client client.spec.md
storage-provider storage-provider.spec.md · storage-provider-abstraction.spec.md
data-store data-store.spec.md
data-store-postgres data-store-postgres.spec.md
session-reader session-reader.spec.md
infra infrastructure-topology-ui.spec.md
capabilities · developer-repository-mapping developer-suite/repository-mapping/
perception-layer perception-layer.spec.md
narrative-cluster narrative-cluster.spec.md
captures & recordings capture-registry.spec.md
inquiry weaves inquiry-weave-registration.spec.md
plans & insights plan-insight-perspective-registration.spec.md
council & community council-record.spec.md · community-choice.spec.md
reading & scope reading-layer.spec.md · workspace-scope-and-access.spec.md
film production relational-production-protocol.spec.md · film-production-upgrades.spec.md
kinship & bridges kinship-graph.spec.md · narrative-medicine-wheel-bridge.spec.md · article-publishing-pipeline.spec.md

LLM Integration

Getting Started

Development

This is a monorepo using npm workspaces.

# Build all packages
npm run build:packages

# Start development server (Next.js)
npm run dev

Installation

# Install individual packages (from registry when published)
npm install @medicine-wheel/ontology-core
npm install @medicine-wheel/narrative-engine

App package CLI

# Install the published app package
npm install -g @medicine-wheel/app

# Start the server against the current directory's .mw/store
mwsrv -D ./

# Start the server in Docker with the published image
mwsrv --docker -D /src/myapp

# Talk to the running server
mw status
mw directions
mw node list
mw ceremony list
mw beat list
mw web <node-id> [depth]          # one node's neighbourhood
mw chart list                     # structural tension charts
mw validate wilson "<description>"  # validators (wilson, ocap, accountability, bridge)
mw orient "<outcome>"             # the question asked before the work

The mw CLI uses HTTP against the running server by default (MW_API_URL, default http://localhost:8040); MCP fallback is available via a local MW_MCP_PATH. mw skill view and mw skill install work with the shipped skill definitions — mw skill run exits 3 by design, because the skills are documents and there is no runtime that executes them.

MCP server

# stdio — local JSONL store under .mw/store/
npx @medicine-wheel/mcp

# server-mediated store — the same relational state the app holds
MW_API_URL=http://localhost:8040 npx @medicine-wheel/mcp

85 tools over stdio and StreamableHTTP (POST /api/mcp on the running app).

Honcho projection (optional)

HONCHO_URL=http://localhost:8133        # switches the river on
HONCHO_WORKSPACE_ID=medicine-wheel      # default
# HONCHO_API_KEY when Honcho asks for auth

With HONCHO_URL set, every stored beat, ceremony and diary entry projects into Honcho on write, in the background. GET /api/health reports honcho.enabled. A projection never delays the wheel’s answer, and a Honcho that is down is a line on stderr, not an error to the writer. The record is not lost: its reference waits in honcho-pending.jsonl beside the store and is sent again on start, every five minutes, and after any projection that gets through — honcho.pending counts what waits. A running server holds its old build and its old environment — restart it for either to take effect.

Event log

Every write to a cycle, beat, ceremony, diary entry, node or relation leaves one line in events.jsonl beside the store (MW_EVENTS_FILE overrides). Nodes include circles, chronicle episodes and memory conclusions. Captures, inquiry weaves, plan perspectives, charts and MMOTs are not recorded yet. Each line is a MiadiEventEnvelope (jgwill/Miadi rispecs/events/00-miadi-event-spine.rispec.md) namespaced medicine-wheel.*: cycle.opened, beat.recorded, ceremony.closed, circle.created, chronicle.episode.registered, chronicle.lineage.made, relation.made, … — 32 in all, catalogued in @medicine-wheel/events.

curl 'localhost:8040/api/events?type=cycle.&limit=20'   # newest first; type, subject, correlation, since, limit
mw events --correlation <cycle-id>                      # a cycle's moments; also on the cycle's page
mw events schema [--asyncapi]                           # the JSON Schema, or the AsyncAPI document

Set MW_INSTANCE (e.g. ilex:8040) to name this wheel in each event’s source.instance.

Carried by git. Set MW_EVENTS_GIT_SYNC=push and the wheel commits events.jsonl (that file only) in its data repository and pushes it. It never pushes someone else’s commit. A follower elsewhere runs mw-events follow <clone> --exec <command> and handles each event it has not seen yet. See the package README.

Two chronicle episodes related through the Miadi lineage door (POST /api/edges between two chronicle_episode nodes) produce chronicle.lineage.made, which carries the manifest’s sentence that says why.

Publishing. Nothing leaves the machine until a destination is configured. Each destination is an adapter with its own cursor, so one that is down never holds another back:

The wheel sends in log order, after every write and every minute. Each adapter declares what it guarantees, and receipts record arrived, failed (kept and retried) or refused (recorded and passed). Wrong credentials and wrong addresses count as failed, never as refused.

mw events status, mw events publish and mw events replay <event-id|all> --publisher <name> show and drive it, as do GET and POST /api/events/publish.

NATS JetStream and Kafka are specified, not built. Which broker to try first is weighed in miadi-chronicle://548, foundations/broker-adapters/ (jgwill/medicine-wheel#165).

License

Indigenous Knowledge Stewardship License (IKSL) v1.0 MIT Derived see LICENSE

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