Concepts

Trees, groves, and canopies

OKForest’s editions mirror how organizations grow:

• A tree is one OKF bundle in one Git repository, such as acme/sales-okf. OKForest recommends naming tree repositories <scope>-okf.
• A grove is many trees combined into one company knowledge base, with shared standards and access control.
• A canopy is many groves, plus shared and public trees from partners, vendors, and regulators, and llms.txt sites.

The word “branch” is avoided on purpose, so that it only ever means a Git branch.

Owners and Stewards

Each tree names its people in .okforest/tree.yaml, an OKForest file next to the OKF bundle:

tree: sales
title: Sales knowledge
owner: user:jane@acme.example      # exactly one person
backup_owner: user:sam@acme.example
stewards:
  - group: sales-leads

• The Owner is accountable for the tree’s accuracy. It is always exactly one person, because when no one person is accountable, no one is.
• Stewards review and approve changes. They may be people or groups; groups are recommended, because they survive departures and reorganizations.
• Contributors and AI assistants may propose changes. An AI assistant may never approve one.

Trust, status, and freshness

OKF v0.2 gives every concept signals that OKForest shows to people and passes to AI assistants, so an answer can say how much to rely on it:

Signal	Comes from	Values
Trust tier	verified	unverified (no verification), machine-confirmed (verified by a process), human-reviewed (verified by a person)
Status	status	draft, stable (the default), deprecated
Staleness	stale_after	Stale once the date has passed
Provenance	sources, generated	Where the content came from, and who or what wrote it

Diagrams as code

Diagrams belong in concepts as code blocks (```d2 or ```mermaid), not as images: their source can be diffed, reviewed, and edited by people and AI assistants alike. The okforest/d2-syntax and okforest/mermaid-syntax rules check that they parse.