Onboarding Protocol

Admission is the moment a stranger becomes bound by — and protected by — the community’s rules. If the criteria are informal, the decision collapses into whoever happens to like the applicant. Written criteria make admission a governance act, not a social favor, and make rejection defensible on grounds the community can point to.

State the explicit conditions under which an applicant may be admitted. Each criterion should be testable from the application itself or from an external check.

Consent to governance only means something if the member has actually seen the governance. A fixed sequence — review, consent, technical setup — ensures every Full Member crossed the same threshold in the same order, so nobody slips into full rights without having encountered the constraints that come with them.

List the ordered steps every new member must complete to move from applicant to Full Member. Include explicit consent steps and any tooling/access provisioning required.

Between “applicant approved” and “fully integrated” there is a real gap — permissions, access, and expectations all change. Declaring the exact state a new member holds at each step removes ambiguity about what they can do right now, and prevents unintentional grants of rights before onboarding is complete.

State the membership states a member transitions through during onboarding, and what triggers each transition. Reference the Membership State Registry.

An unbounded trial is a second-class membership that never ends — all obligations, fewer rights. Fixing the duration, the criteria, and the failure path forces a decision point: either the new member transitions into full standing or a defined exit runs. It prevents the trial state from becoming a permanent holding pen.

Define the duration, evaluation criteria, transition decision, grace period, failure path, and any extension rules. Trial rights are defined in the Membership State Registry.

The completion record is the evidence that a member consented to a specific version of the rules on a specific date. Losing or editing it would make it impossible to answer, months or years later, “what exactly did they agree to?” — which is the only question that matters when a dispute arrives.

State where the completion record is kept, what it captures (timestamp, artifact versions consented to), and the retention rule.