Treasury Ruleset

Without an explicit boundary, any money flowing near the community — a founder’s personal card, a side account, an informal reimbursement pool — can drift into being treated as community money, with all the obligations that entails. Naming exactly which accounts are treasury and which are not protects both the community and the individuals paying out of pocket.

Name every account that is treasury (wallet, bank account, etc.) and state explicitly that personal funds operating informally are not treasury and create no community obligation.

Every income source carries strings — reporting requirements, expectations, dependency risks. If income channels can open informally, those strings get attached before the community has had a chance to weigh them. One declared list, changed only through Strategic decisions, keeps the community’s obligations under its own control.

Name every income source the community currently has, and reference the Internal Economy Protocol for the rule that any new income channel requires a Strategic decision.

When spending authority is vague, two failure modes appear: either every small decision escalates and nothing gets done, or a single steward quietly accumulates discretion no one ever voted to grant them. A table of amounts, decision types, and authorized bodies removes the ambiguity and makes unauthorized spending immediately visible.

Define spending tiers by amount and the decision type, authorized body, and mechanism for each. Multi-year contracts and debt should sit in their own (Constitutional) tier.

Opacity in a treasury compounds: one missing disclosure invites another, and before long members can no longer verify whether the community’s money is being handled as they agreed. Making real-time visibility the baseline — and requiring any exception to be named, justified, and time-bounded — keeps audit within reach of every member, not just stewards.

State the visibility default for each treasury account. Where direct visibility is not possible (e.g. some bank accounts), define a periodic reporting cadence with a named owner.

Debt and recurring commitments bind the community beyond the people currently in it — future members inherit the obligations. Forbidding them unless a Strategic vote explicitly authorizes keeps long-term constraints from being entered into casually, and preserves the option to stay lightweight.

State the rules on debt, recurring obligations, contingency reserves, and off-treasury financial instruments. Default to “not allowed without Strategic vote” for anything that binds the future.

Even well-intentioned people unconsciously tilt decisions toward their own interests; a rule that requires disclosure and abstention removes the judgment call and the social pressure to “trust someone.” Self-approval of spending is the single most common way small governance systems quietly lose integrity, so the rule is stated bluntly.

State the no-self-approval rule and the disclose-and-abstain rule for any member with a direct financial interest in a spending decision.