Change Protocol

A change that arrives as a vague idea in chat cannot be evaluated, challenged, or rolled back later. Forcing every proposal through the same minimum shape — affected artifacts, rationale, risks, rollback — turns an opinion into a reviewable artifact and makes it impossible to slip a rule change past the community by accident.

State who may propose, where proposals are submitted, and the mandatory content fields. Tie this to the Governance Protocol (Layer 2).

Not every change deserves the same friction. Typo fixes should not need a supermajority; constitutional shifts should not pass quietly. Mapping proposals to decision types — and defaulting unclear cases upward — makes the cost of a change proportional to its blast radius and protects Layer 0 from being eroded through small moves.

Define what falls under each decision type. State the default-higher rule for ambiguous cases.

Without a floor on deliberation time, any change can be rushed through on a slow day when few members are paying attention. Mandatory minimums — longer for higher-impact changes — guarantee that members who are travelling, ill, or simply busy still get a real chance to read, object, or show up.

Set minimum deliberation periods for each decision type, and a ratification period for Constitutional changes.

A vote that passes but is never written down is the same as no vote at all — and worse, it creates a gap where whoever remembers the outcome gets to define it. Tight, ordered publication steps close that gap and make “what was adopted” a matter of record, not of memory.

State the ordered steps that must run after a proposal passes. Include time bounds and the version-history obligation.

Rejected ideas carry as much signal as accepted ones — they show what the community considered and declined. Keeping rejections filed and accessible prevents the same proposal from reappearing under a new name every six months and gives future members a view of the paths not taken.

State the archive location for rejected proposals and the re-vote conditions for revisiting the question.

If new rules could silently rewrite existing agreements, membership would be meaningless — what you signed up for could be changed out from under you. Explicit transition rules guarantee that rights are not reduced retroactively and that people operating under the old rules are given time and notice before the ground shifts.

State the rules protecting existing role holders, members, and records when a rule change takes effect.