State the change
Define the exact problem, affected artifacts and domains, legal or institutional effects, alternatives and machine-readable projections that may need to change.
Exergism Commons · institutional control plane
Governance you can follow.
The proposed system turns institutional authority into an explicit path: propose a change, classify it, determine who may decide, apply conflicts and thresholds, bind the result to evidence, validate the record, then delegate implementation.
Public by default. Strong stewardship without ownership. Machine validation without machine-made legitimacy.
The operating idea
A decision is not authority merely because somebody merged it.
01 · How governance works
From proposal to execution.
A governance action moves through explicit stages. Human rules determine what authority is required; machine-readable records make the resulting state reconstructable and testable. Technical permissions never substitute for the required decision.
Bootstrap rule: while
policy/governance-status.json remains operative: false, draft decisions, Members, Founding Steward assignments and delegations cannot be represented as operative merely because GitHub or CI accepted them.Choose the required process
Editorial, descriptive, policy, constitutional, mission-locked, legal-instrument or adoption-state. If reasonable reviewers disagree, use the higher class.
Freeze who can decide
Resolve Active Members, class-specific voting seasoning and conflicts at the voting-window opening date. GitHub access, funding and contribution history do not create a vote.
Apply the rule
Open the vote or other required process, authenticate ballots, apply recusals, quorum and the exact approval threshold, plus any guardian or independent-review requirements.
Bind the outcome to evidence
Create an immutable GovernanceDecision record that identifies the rule, electorate, ballots, evidence, exact payload and outcome. A stored “approved” flag is not trusted on its own.
Recompute, do not merely trust
SHACL and deterministic validators test structural and temporal invariants, reconstruct eligibility and reject inconsistent or under-specified authority claims.
Name the implementation authority
If execution requires an actor or role, create an explicit scoped delegation: source authority, resources, allowed actions, prohibitions, effective dates, expiry and revocation mechanism.
Change the owning domain
Funding, ID, repositories or another domain performs the authorized action in its own canonical system. Governance supplies authority; it does not silently rewrite domain facts.
Start here
I want to propose something.
Open a governance change only for organization-level institutional rules. If the proposal changes a project-specific canonical artifact, use that project's own process instead.
- Describe the exact problem.
Say what is broken or missing, not merely what text you want edited.
- Name affected authority.
Mission Lock, Membership, voting, delegation, contributor rights, treasury, persistent infrastructure, privacy or another institutional layer.
- Declare the change class.
Do not bury constitutional, mission-locked, legal or adoption effects inside refactors.
- Update human and machine layers together.
If the concept exists in
policy/**,ontology/**or the machine spec, update the projection or explain why it does not change. - Expose objections and compatibility effects.
Include alternatives, non-retroactivity consequences and any cross-domain implementation required.
Classification guide
| Class | Use when | Typical process consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Editorial | Wording, links, formatting or metadata with no policy effect. | No institutional authority change. |
| Descriptive architecture | Documents an existing boundary without changing rights or authority. | Review the description against canonical sources. |
| Policy | Changes an organization-level process or requirement inside the constitutional envelope. | Uses the applicable adopted decision rule. |
| Constitutional | Changes Membership, thresholds, roles, conflicts, delegation boundaries, persistent-infrastructure authority or amendment mechanics. | ConstitutionalAmendment. |
| Mission-locked | Weakens or bypasses a protected Mission Lock invariant or protected mission mechanism. | MissionLockedAmendment; cannot be downgraded by labeling. |
| Legal instrument | Changes CLA terms, grants, representations, governing law, signature mechanics or another legally consequential instrument. | Legal-instrument process and any required qualified review. |
| Adoption state | Changes whether governance, Membership, Founding Stewardship or a legal instrument is actually operative. | Isolated activation change with legal/adoption evidence and fail-closed checks. |
02 · Constitutional architecture
What constrains the process.
Organization governance owns cross-project institutional rules. Project-specific philosophical, evidentiary, legal and technical authority remains with the repository that owns that layer.
01Mission / ConstitutionHighest organization-level constraints
02Adopted policyVersioned institutional rules
03Membership + rolesWho holds which authority
04GovernanceDecisionSpecific authorized outcome
05Delegation / implementationScoped execution
Mission Lock
Protect institutional identity, authority separation, non-ownership membership, identifier integrity and anti-capture constraints without freezing every roadmap decision.
Explicit delegation
Repository access, DNS control, banking authority or technical permissions do not automatically become institutional authority.
No governance-for-money
Funding, donations, employment and economic relationships do not purchase organization-wide voting weight or institutional ownership.
Separated authority
Governance may constrain institutional process, but it does not silently rewrite Exergism releases, ECL artifacts, Funding records or patent grants.
03 · Membership + stewardship
Who can participate in a decision?
Membership is governance status, not property. The electorate is derived from explicit Membership history and the applicable voting class, not from GitHub state or economic relationships.
01ParticipantOpen participation
02Candidate≥ 30 days
03Active MemberExplicit institutional status
04Voting seasoningClass-specific eligibility
Founding stewardship
Strong stewardship without ownership.
The draft framework makes current founder dependence explicit. During F0, the Founding Steward can provide strong bootstrap coordination and a narrow negative Mission Veto. Founder authority is separate from the founder's ordinary Member vote and does not become weighted voting or automatic economic privilege.
Founder-led bootstrap
High coordination concentration is acknowledged and bounded rather than disguised.
Early institution
Requires an operative Member Registry, at least three Active Members and independent institutional capacity.
Distributed institution
Targets broader membership, sustained governance records, independent review and reduced single-person operational concentration.
04 · Decision classes
Different decisions need different friction.
Thresholds use exact integer ratios. Conflicted voters are excluded from the effective eligible denominator under the proposed rule, and abstentions count toward quorum but not toward the valid for/against approval denominator where the class uses that denominator.
Ordinary Approval
- Quorum
- > 1/2
- Approval
- For > Against
Routine organization-level decisions inside existing authority.
Qualified Approval
- Quorum
- ≥ 2/3
- Approval
- ≥ 2/3
Protected actions including persistent-domain transfer, identifier-authority transfer, legal-steward changes, organization-wide exclusive IP transfer, institutional merger/dissolution/succession and exceptional Endowment-principal withdrawal.
Constitutional Amendment
- Quorum
- ≥ 2/3
- Approval
- ≥ 3/4
Changes to the ordinary constitutional framework.
Mission-Locked Amendment
- Quorum
- ≥ 3/4
- Approval
- ≥ 9/10
Two successful votes at least 60 days apart, independent review and guardian consent during F0/F1. The proposal's label cannot downgrade this class.
05 · What happens during a vote
The tally is the end of a proof chain.
The draft machine contract is deliberately stricter than “count some comments on a PR”. It must be possible to reconstruct who was eligible, why anyone was recused, who cast each counted ballot and which exact decision payload they voted on.
Open voting
Bind the decision ID, decision class, governing rule and voting-window opening date.
Freeze electorate
Reconstruct Membership history and class-specific seasoning at the opening date.
Resolve recusals
A denominator-changing recusal needs a content-addressed conflict determination for the same decision and person.
Authenticate votes
Each counted Member ballot binds decision ID, class, opening date, Member person ID and vote value, plus signature and verification evidence.
Calculate result
The validator recomputes quorum and approval. It does not trust a stored result: approved field.
Conflict evidence
Self-compensation and other direct private interests require recusal. Founder status does not override the conflict rule.
Ballot evidence
A bare {person_id, vote} or another participant's tally cannot establish that a Member actually cast the ballot.
Historical state
Eligibility, Founding Steward authority and delegations are evaluated at the relevant decision/effective date so current-state edits cannot rewrite history.
06 · Worked example
Transfer control of exergism.org.
Suppose EC wants to permanently transfer registrar recovery control or persistent-domain authority. Under the proposed rules this is not ordinary web administration: it is a protected institutional action.
Stable decision identity
https://id.exergism.org/governance/decision/{stable-id}Proposal
Identify the exact domain authority being transferred, recipient, scope, permanence, risks, alternatives and implementation requirements.
Classification
Qualified Approval is mandatory for persistent-domain transfer and identifier-authority transfer. If the proposal also weakens a Mission Lock invariant, the higher Mission-Locked process applies.
Electorate + conflicts
Freeze eligible seasoned Members at the opening date and resolve any conflict determinations before computing the effective denominator.
Vote
Reach quorum ≥2/3 of effective eligible voters and approval ≥2/3 of valid for/against votes, with authenticated ballots for the exact payload.
Decision record
Bind the result, electorate, recusals, ballots, rule version, payload digest and supporting evidence to an immutable GovernanceDecision record.
Validation
Machine checks recompute the threshold and verify structural, temporal and authority constraints. Passing validation confirms declared machine-checkable consistency, not legal validity by itself.
Delegation + execution
If a specific operator must perform the registrar action, the decision creates or authorizes a scoped delegation. The registrar/domain implementation then executes the approved transfer.
Governance
Defines the approval class and records the institutional decision.
Delegation
States who may execute which action against which exact resource.
Infrastructure
Registrar, ID resolver or repository performs the technical implementation.
History remains
Immutable evidence makes the authority chain reconstructable after current state changes.
07 · Machine-readable governance
Machines verify constraints. They do not manufacture authority.
Human constitutional and adopted policy text remains authoritative. JSON, RDF, OWL, SHACL and deterministic validation are projections and enforcement aids around that human authority model.
Governance vocabulary
https://id.exergism.org/commons#Persistent identifier resolution does not itself make a policy operative.
SPEC
RULE
MEM
DEL
SHACL
CHECK
Machine-readable governance
Authority hierarchy, ballot authentication, temporal state, evidence and validation boundaries.
Decision rules
Exact rational thresholds, protected subjects and conflict rules.
Membership projection
Explicit Member state; never inferred from GitHub, funding, employment or contribution count.
Delegation registry
Scoped authority, source decision, resources, actions, expiry and revocation.
Structural constraints
Reviewable graph constraints that reject inconsistent governance claims.
Temporal validation
Fail-closed checks for Membership, ballots, Founding Stewardship, delegations, phase transitions and CLA state.
08 · Authority boundaries
Governance decides authority; domains retain facts.
Downstream repositories may reference EC approval concepts without copying their definitions. Governance remains authoritative for the organization-level decision concept; the downstream project remains authoritative for its own domain facts and implementation.
Exergism
Canonical philosophy and formal analytical model.
Open repository ↗ECL + ECL-PL
Software/copyright licensing and separate patent architecture retain their own authority boundaries.
Open ECL ↗Funding
Funding strategy and records can require an EC approval class while Funding remains authoritative for the funding facts that trigger it.
Open Funding ↗Identifiers
id.exergism.org resolves stable identifiers. It is not the semantic owner of every resource it resolves.
09 · Contributor rights
License in. Rights retained.
The proposed CLA architecture separates a submitted proposal from an Accepted Contribution. Contributors retain the rights they own; full project grants vest only at the defined acceptance boundary, and the CLA itself grants no patent rights.
- Limited review/archive rights while a proposal is under review.
- Perpetual project grant only for Accepted Contributions.
- Constrained outbound relicensing rather than unlimited institutional discretion.
- Repository administration does not create ownership.
Use the draft
Propose. Classify. Prove. Record. Execute.
The repository contains the constitutional text, proposal rules, Membership model, exact decision thresholds, machine projections and validators behind this workflow. It remains draft until a competent adoption process makes it operative.