docs: decide ownership for shared-surface instruction governance

[claude]

Context

Signed-off decision Q8 of the context-engineering integration contract (2026-09-01): the
corpus critique surfaced shared-surface governance as raised nowhere (gap G-GOV) — when
multiple contributors' preferences meet in one CLAUDE.md / rules / skill set, no convention
says whose preferences win, how conflicts between contributors' standing instructions are
adjudicated, or who owns a shared surface. The articles' own opening example (conflicting
instructions) is jointly produced by different authors; the repo's conflict tooling (I15)
detects pairs but does not assign ownership.

Proposed work

• Decide whether shared-surface governance needs a convention at all in this repo
  (single-operator today; the marketplace's consumers may not be).
• If yes: scope an owner doc (per-surface ownership, precedence between contributors,
  how a consuming team records adjudications); if no: record the rejection in
  docs/out-of-scope/ so the question stops recurring.

Acceptance criteria

• A recorded yes/no with rationale; on yes, a scoped follow-up; on no, an out-of-scope
  ledger entry.

References

The two paths this issue originally cited are both gone. The integration contract was contract
tier and pruned before merge per topic-docs v3.0.0; it survives as the pasted body of #3588
(merged as ae3aa802). The .work/ coverage ledger was memory tier and never committed, as the
original text already flagged — its G-GOV substance is restated in the Context above and is the
authoritative statement of the gap.

• feat(conventions): absorb the context-engineering corpus and add the instruction exception register #3588 — the merged pull request whose body carries the signed-off contract, including Q8.
• docs/specs/context-engineering-critical-apparatus.md — the graduated critique rows, including
  the cross-source tensions the G-GOV gap came out of.
• plugins/claude-config/skills/audit-instructions/reference/conflict-criteria.md — I15, which
  detects conflicting pairs without assigning ownership; that gap is what this issue decides on.

Note for whoever picks this up: #3588 added
docs/conventions/instruction-exception-register/, which governs which instructions may be
deleted, not who owns a shared surface. It is adjacent but does not answer this question, and
adopting it as an answer would be a misread.