Purpose Charter

Every decision, role, and allocation of resources downstream has to stay consistent with one thing — the community’s primary purpose. If it drifts, shifts with trends, or gets rewritten to justify the latest project, there is nothing left to anchor governance to. A single, stable primary purpose is the constitutional north star: strategies change, the purpose does not.

State exactly one primary purpose. It must describe the enduring reason your community exists — not a project, strategy, or short-term goal. One or two sentences.

A community rarely does only one thing. Secondary purposes make space for the other concrete outcomes the community pursues — but they are subordinate. If a secondary purpose ever conflicts with the primary, the primary wins. Declaring them explicitly prevents scope creep from masquerading as core work.

List concrete secondary outcomes the community pursues. They must not conflict with or override the primary purpose. Remove the section entirely if you have none.

Communities drift by accretion — one uncontested assumption at a time. Naming what the community is explicitly not makes boundary violations visible early, and gives anyone a clear basis to object before an activity becomes normalized. Silence here gets read as consent.

Name the things your community is explicitly NOT, especially identities or roles others might assume by default (political party, investment vehicle, religious group, etc.).

Purpose is the one thing everything else depends on. If it were easy to change, nothing above it in the stack — membership, governance, invariants — could be trusted to mean the same thing from one year to the next. Constitutional-level thresholds and a ratification delay force a deliberate, visible act, not a quiet drift.

Describe the change procedure. At minimum: the decision type required for the primary purpose (Constitutional, per Layer 2), the threshold, the ratification delay, and where the change is recorded (Layer 6 version history). Secondary purposes typically need a lower bar.