Governance Protocol

A decision process that accepts proposals informally — a message, a verbal suggestion, a founder’s idea — has no reliable way to tell what is actually on the table. Requiring a standard submission format, filing location, and mandatory content fields means every proposal arrives with the same information, visible to everyone, traceable from day one.

State who may propose, where proposals are submitted, the mandatory content fields, and how decision type is determined and challenged.

Rushed votes favor whoever is already paying attention and disadvantage everyone else. A mandatory deliberation period, tied to the weight of the decision, gives members time to read, respond, and surface concerns before the vote opens — so the vote reflects considered judgment, not speed of reaction.

Name the deliberation venues and the minimum periods for Strategic and Constitutional decisions before a vote may open.

A passed proposal that never reaches the affected artifact is a decision in name only — the rules on the ground still say what they said before. Binding execution to a concrete artifact update and version-history entry closes the gap between what was decided and what is actually in force.

State what happens when a proposal passes (artifact updates, version history) and when it is rejected (archive). Define a time bound for both.

Keeping a record of only the decisions that passed erases the reasoning history — members lose track of what was already considered and rejected, and the same debates get re-litigated indefinitely. Archiving both passed and rejected proposals, with a time bound and a verifiable decision record, preserves institutional memory and makes the governance system auditable.

State retention rules for passed and rejected proposals, what counts as the decision record, and the version-history update obligation.

A governance system with no appeal route hardens mistakes into permanent rules; one with unlimited informal appeal paths never settles anything. Allowing any Full Member to trigger a re-vote — but only with a written, reasoned objection raising something not already addressed — keeps the system self-correcting without turning every decision into a standing referendum.

Define the conditions for triggering a re-vote, the objection format, and the threshold/mechanism for the re-vote itself.

When two decisions point in different directions, someone has to choose which one counts — and if that choice is made ad hoc, it reduces to whoever has the authority or energy to enforce their reading. A fixed precedence rule (higher type wins; more recent wins at the same type) resolves conflicts mechanically, without a judgment call.

State the precedence rule (typically: higher decision type prevails; more recent wins at the same type, unless explicitly locked).

Every governance system fails somewhere — captured by a subgroup, frozen by informal vetoes, drifted by a role holder who quietly expanded their remit. Naming the specific failure modes in advance, wiring in challenge routes that cannot be retaliated against, and requiring a formal review when failures accumulate, is what keeps governance from slowly hollowing out while no one is watching.

For each named failure mode, state the safeguard. Include a trigger that forces a Constitutional review if failures accumulate.