ContextSync Protocol

The git for organizational context.

An open protocol for synchronizing versioned, permissioned, auditable organizational knowledge between human and AI actors.

Content-addressed. Versioned. Permissioned. Auditable. Real-time.

---

What is ContextSync?

ContextSync is a protocol specification — not a product, not a framework, not a library. It defines how organizational artifacts (policies, procedures, datasets, business intelligence) are addressed, versioned, permissioned, queried, and mutated across any number of human users and AI agents.

MCP solved how agents connect to tools. ContextSync solves how agents connect to organizational context.

Any organization can implement it. Any agent framework can speak it. Any tool vendor can integrate with it.

---

Why

Organizations deploying AI agents alongside human teams have no standard protocol for keeping both sides synchronized on the same organizational context. Knowledge lives fragmented across Slack, email, drives, wikis, and SaaS tools.

When a human updates a compliance policy at 09:00, the agent processing customer requests at 09:05 has no way of knowing the policy changed. When an agent writes a research brief, the human reviewing it cannot trace which source versions it used.

This produces three cascading failures:

• Information decay — agents operate on stale context; in regulated industries this is a compliance risk
• Coordination collapse — multiple actors writing to the same knowledge base with no protocol governing ordering, conflict detection, or attribution
• Auditability gap — no audit trail that captures the full provenance chain across the human-AI boundary

---

The Five Primitives

1. Content-Addressed Artifacts

Every artifact gets a stable, unique URI:

ctx://{org}/{domain}/{id}

This address persists across edits, moves, and renames. The URI scheme is hierarchical: organizations contain domains, domains contain artifacts.

2. Versioned State

Every mutation produces a new version with a monotonically increasing version number, an author (human or agent), a timestamp, a change summary, and a content-addressable hash (SHA-256). Any actor can request a line-level diff between any two versions. Full rollback is supported.

3. Change Subscriptions

Actors subscribe to change feeds on specific artifacts, domains, or the entire context. Notifications are delivered via Server-Sent Events containing the diff, author, and version number. No polling. Millisecond propagation.

4. Permissioned Access

Permissions are expressed as tuples:

(actor | agent_class, artifact_pattern, operations)

• Grants target a specific actor (human-alex-chen) or an entire agent class (compliance-monitor)
• Patterns support glob wildcards: ctx://acme/compliance/*
• Operations: read, write, suggest, approve, admin
• The system is default-deny: no access unless explicitly granted

5. Provenance Tracking

Every read and write is recorded as an immutable provenance entry: who, what artifact, which version, when, and optionally what downstream artifact it informed. This is the layer that answers the question regulators ask.

---

Protocol Surface

See SPEC.md for the complete protocol specification including request/response schemas, error codes, and object models.

Summary

Resource	Endpoints
Artifacts	Create, read (with version), update, soft-delete, history, diff, list
Actors	Create, list, get
Changes	Global feed, domain-scoped feed
Subscriptions	Create, stream (SSE), delete
Permissions	Grant, list, explain
Provenance	Query by artifact or actor

---

Object Models

Artifact

Field	Type	Description
uri	string	ctx://{org}/{domain}/{id}
name	string	Human-readable name
org	string	Organization identifier
domain	string	Functional domain (compliance, engineering, hr, etc.)
content_type	string	MIME type
head_version	integer	Current version number
created_at	ISO 8601	Creation timestamp
updated_at	ISO 8601	Last mutation timestamp

Actor

Field	Type	Description
actor_id	string	Unique identifier
actor_type	enum	human or agent
name	string	Display name
agent_class	string	(agents only) Class for permission grouping

Change Event

Field	Type	Description
event_id	string	Unique event identifier
event_type	string	artifact.created or artifact.updated
artifact_uri	string	The artifact that changed
version	integer	New version number
previous_version	integer	Prior version (null for creates)
author_id	string	Who made the change
summary	string	Human-readable change description
diff_json	object	Diff statistics
created_at	ISO 8601	Event timestamp

Permission Tuple

Field	Type	Description
actor_id	string	Specific actor (mutually exclusive with agent_class)
agent_class	string	Agent class for bulk grants
artifact_pattern	string	Glob pattern (ctx://acme/compliance/*)
operations	string[]	read, write, suggest, approve, admin

Provenance Record

Field	Type	Description
prov_id	string	Unique record identifier
actor_id	string	Who performed the operation
operation	enum	read or write
artifact_uri	string	Target artifact
version_touched	integer	Version that was read or created
downstream_uri	string	(optional) Artifact this read informed
created_at	ISO 8601	Timestamp

---

Documents

Document	Description
SPEC.md	Complete protocol specification
WHITEPAPER.md	Problem statement, protocol design, evaluation
ENTERPRISE.md	GCP and AWS production architectures
COMPETITIVE.md	Competitive landscape analysis

---

Team

• Christian Johnson
• Vikas Badam
• Sage Hart
• Eswari Subbiah

---

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE

---

ContextSync | DevFest 2026 | WashU