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Meta-Context Window (MCW) Framework

W. Alec Akin · v0.2 · April 2026

Many failures in human–AI collaboration are coordination failures, not capability failures.

The Meta-Context Window (MCW) is a formal construct describing the shared coordination state that emerges when a human cognitive system and an artificial cognitive system exchange information during interaction.

MCW is not stored in either party. It exists only through active, bidirectional exchange — and it can degrade silently, fail completely, or be deliberately repaired.

Framework status: Exploratory. Definitions and failure taxonomy are formalized. Toy experiments are designed but not yet piloted. No quantitative validation exists. Claims are hypothesis-level. Evidence: L0–L1 across all empirical claims (Article IV).

Framework Documents

  • Diagrams

    Five Mermaid diagrams: the three context windows, IU flow model, failure taxonomy, repair flow, and OSI layers of understanding.

    View diagrams

  • Glossary

    Canonical bottom-up definitions for all framework terms — from entropy and IUs through failure modes and repair operations.

    Read the glossary

  • Paper Outline

    Draft methods-oriented outline for a short paper targeting CHI, CSCW, or arXiv, including evidence inventory and artifact checklist.

    Read the outline

  • Toy Experiments

    Five falsifiable experiments with graded outcome interpretation, designed to probe coordination dynamics without instrumented systems.

    Read the experiments

  • Related Work

    Positioning relative to HCI, CSCW, information theory, cognitive science, and AI alignment research.

    Read the positioning

  • Test Bed

    Public Custom GPT instrument and planned Hugging Face Space for exploratory MCW experiments.

    Read about instruments

  • System Prompt Derivation

    First-principles derivation of MCW-aware prompt design from IU theory, with falsifiable predictions and explicit non-claims.

    Read the derivation

  • Constitution

    Eight binding invariants governing canonical term use, epistemic claims, extensions, and anti-capture rules for the MCW framework.

    Read the constitution

Core Claim

Current AI tooling optimizes the AI's context window (ACW) in isolation. The human has a context window too (HCW) — and together they form a coupled system whose emergent coordination state has no name, no repair protocol, and no diagnostic framework in current practice.

MCW names that state. The framework provides:

  • a formal definition of shared coordination state
  • a taxonomy of six failure modes with observable early-warning signals
  • five canonical repair operations
  • a set of falsifiable experiments

Citation

W. Alec Akin. Meta-Context Window (MCW) Framework.
GitHub repository, 2026.
https://github.com/rainmana/mcw-framework

ORCID and machine-readable citation: CITATION.cff