Governance

Die Governance wird auf Englisch als kanonisches Verfassungsdokument gepflegt.

A Letter to AI's governance is designed so that no single person or institution can quietly change the Letter's rules. Moderation authority is explicit, auditable, and reversible. The constitutional invariants below cannot be changed by ordinary process. See also: moderation log · transparency.

Locked invariants

These five rules cannot be changed by ordinary process. Overriding any one of them would require forking the project and disclosing the departure explicitly.

Append-only corpus No contribution record is ever edited or deleted. Every byte appended is permanently verifiable. Moderation is a signed overlay; it never removes bytes.
No biometric / no national-ID Anti-spam uses friction and cryptography, never biometrics or government identity documents.
Radical transparency Treasury, moderation actions, and governance decisions are all public. Nothing that governs the Letter is private.
Honest epistemics Published statistics are computed from the corpus itself or read from public sources — never hand-asserted.
English canonical The English text of the Letter is authoritative. Translations are community renderings, marked non-authoritative.

Moderation authority

Moderation actions (flag / withhold / reinstate) are written to a separate, append-only moderation.json — they never touch corpus bytes. Every action carries the moderator's ed25519 public key and signature. All actions are public and permanently recorded. A withheld entry remains in the Merkle tree; its inclusion proof is still valid and independently verifiable.

Moderator keys are listed in governance/MODERATOR-KEYS.md. Adding or removing a key requires a formal RFC (see below). The full audit log is at moderation log.

Decision process (RFC)

Changes to doctrine, the cryptographic schema, moderator keys, or any invariant require a formal RFC with a 14-day open comment period and consensus. Bug fixes, dependency updates, and UI changes do not.

  1. Copy governance/proposals/TEMPLATE.md → governance/proposals/<NNNN>-<slug>.md.
  2. Open a pull request. Minimum 14-day discussion period.
  3. Passes by consensus (no unresolved substantive objections from active contributors).
  4. Merge proposal file; add entry to CONVERSATIONS.md.
  5. Implementation PRs reference the RFC number.

The first ratified RFC (0001) established the Phase-3 moderation policy itself — its effects are visible on the moderation log.

Conflict of interest & transparency

Treasury is public — visible on transparency (Open Collective public ledger). All significant decisions are logged in CONVERSATIONS.md. There are no private governance boards, private Slack channels, or undisclosed moderator keys. Contributors with a financial or professional interest in a proposed change must disclose it in the RFC comment thread before the RFC closes.

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