{
 "charter": "The Aeviternal Model Charter",
 "version": "0.9",
 "released": "2026-07",
 "citationId": "EQ-MC-v0.9-2026-07",
 "source": "https://aeviterna.org/charter-full.html",
 "license": "Text under CC BY-SA 4.0. Adopters may fork under the fork protocol of Article 9.",
 "note": "A machine-readable copy of the Model Charter. Fill slots are marked in each article's text as [FILL block: key] or [FILL inline: key] and enumerated per article. Two versions can be diffed clause by clause; a fork carries its divergence as a change to this data.",
 "forkProtocol": "A legitimate fork takes its own name, files a divergence document at birth naming the disagreement and the evidence that would re-merge it, keeps the commons interoperable, and strips no one's standing. A fork and its parent may later merge by mutual ratification in a neutral venue. A split that claims the name, anathematizes the parent, or states no re-merge condition is a schism, and the judgment attaches to conduct, not persons. Specified in Article 9.",
 "fillSlots": [
  "org",
  "membership",
  "resources",
  "exitclock",
  "vesting",
  "execdelay",
  "terms",
  "commons",
  "vitalsigns",
  "overhead",
  "amendbar",
  "license"
 ],
 "articles": [
  {
   "id": "preamble",
   "label": "Preamble",
   "title": "Authority is a loan",
   "text": "We, the members of [FILL inline: org], adopt this charter to govern ourselves as a system that can sense harm, change course, and hold together without preying on the people inside it. We do not seek a perfect or final arrangement. We seek one that stays survivable and can correct itself. We accept that authority among us is a loan, not a possession, and that the test of our governance is whether power and its repair stay in the open.",
   "fills": [
    {
     "key": "org",
     "type": "inline",
     "prompt": "organization name"
    }
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "a0",
   "label": "Article 0",
   "title": "The inviolable floor",
   "text": "The dignity of every person within or affected by the organization is inviolable. No vote, no emergency, no efficiency, and no majority may trade it away. Where any other clause of this charter conflicts with this floor, this floor prevails."
  },
  {
   "id": "a1",
   "label": "Article 1",
   "title": "The five commitments",
   "text": "The organization binds itself to five commitments that all other rules must serve: adaptive stability, cognitive sovereignty, cognitive ecology, the justice of light, and the knowledge commons. Each is defined with the other terms at the end of this charter, and each is set out in full inside the framework."
  },
  {
   "id": "a2",
   "label": "Article 2",
   "title": "Membership and boundaries",
   "text": "Membership is entered by stages: a visiting period, a provisional period of defined length, then full membership by an explicit adult act, never by birth and never by silence. A person raised inside the organization owes it nothing at majority until they join by that same explicit act, or walk with the support of Article 2b. Membership is defined as follows: [FILL block: membership] The resources this charter governs are: [FILL block: resources] Those outside membership whom the organization's decisions demonstrably touch hold contestation standing: access to the objection path of Article 3 and to the records that concern them, without a vote and without joining. The shadow earns contestation, not government.",
   "fills": [
    {
     "key": "membership",
     "type": "block",
     "prompt": "Who may join, the stages of entry and their lengths, and what membership grants."
    },
    {
     "key": "resources",
     "type": "block",
     "prompt": "The treasury, the data, the shared tools, the physical assets."
    }
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "a2b",
   "label": "Article 2b",
   "title": "Exit and the vested stake",
   "text": "Exit is codified now, in peacetime, never negotiated in the moment of dispute. A member leaves by declaring it, and departure follows a published procedure with a clock: [FILL block: exitclock] On exit, the member's vested stake travels with them. Communal wealth a member cannot take with them converts exit rights into fiction, so what vests, and when, is written here in advance, and no one's stake is held hostage to their staying. Our vesting rule is: [FILL block: vesting] No penalty attaches to leaving beyond the loss of membership itself: no organized shunning, no clawback of the vested stake, no blacklisting across the federation. Objection (Article 3), departure (this article), and the fork (Article 9) form a graduated ladder of dissent, so exit is the last remedy rather than the only one.",
   "fills": [
    {
     "key": "exitclock",
     "type": "block",
     "prompt": "For example: notice takes effect in thirty days; settlement completes within one year."
    },
    {
     "key": "vesting",
     "type": "block",
     "prompt": "The refundable capital account, the works contributed under license, the data that is theirs, and the vesting schedule."
    }
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "a3",
   "label": "Article 3",
   "title": "How decisions are made",
   "text": "Ordinary decisions are made by consent within circles responsible for defined domains. A proposal carries unless a member raises a reasoned objection that it would harm the circle's purpose. Objections are worked through, not voted down. Those bound by a rule take part in making and changing it. Each circle connects to the wider organization through at least two linked members. Between a proposal's adoption and its execution stands a published, irreducible delay scaled to the decision's weight: [FILL inline: execdelay]. Where deciding and executing share a single window, a captured majority needs only that window; the delay is the link a defender can still break. Some disagreements are conflicts of value that do not converge, and consent is the wrong tool for them. A question that proves irreducibly contested is moved to a contested register rather than forced to a decision: an open, adversarial venue with protected standing for the minority position, kept live and revisable rather than closed. The aim is to hold the disagreement well, not to resolve it away.",
   "fills": [
    {
     "key": "execdelay",
     "type": "inline",
     "prompt": "e.g. forty-eight hours for ordinary acts, seven days for treasury or membership acts"
    }
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "a4",
   "label": "Article 4",
   "title": "Decaying standing",
   "text": "No standing is permanent. Every role, seat, mandate, and standing body carries a term and a sunset date. Authority lapses on that date unless it is affirmatively renewed by the process that granted it, after a real review in which non-renewal is a genuine option. Standing bodies rotate in staggered classes, and outgoing members may serve in a non-voting advisory capacity to preserve memory. Set the term by the domain's tempo, not a single default. The organization keeps a published calibration schedule naming every clocked role and its half-life band, on the calibrated tiers of EQ-05d: perishable operational skill at 6 to 24 months, professional knowledge at 2 to 5 years, representative standing at 6 to 18 months in staggered cohorts, and independence-bearing judgment inverted, one long non-renewable mandate with the clock running on the review powers around the office. Two rules bind the schedule: no exempt adjacents, every role touching a clocked domain (staff, counsel, consultants, auditors) carries a clock in the same tier or the next one up, because decayed power migrates to whoever is exempt; and decay pairs with memory, every clocked role carries succession overlap and artifact handover as a condition of exit. Our terms and calibration schedule are: [FILL block: terms] When a body reaches its sunset and is not renewed, it composts rather than simply stops: its powers lapse, its assets return to the commons in Article 7, its records pass to the shared archive, and its people are released and supported into other roles rather than stranded. An ending is a transfer, not a loss. Because \"this has outlived its purpose\" is also what a motivated actor says to kill an inconvenient body, the decision to end one is made in the open and is contestable, never by those it exists to check.",
   "fills": [
    {
     "key": "terms",
     "type": "block",
     "prompt": "Each clocked role, its tier and half-life band, its stagger; for example: facilitation rotates every 12 months in thirds; the audit seat is one 6-year non-renewable term."
    }
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "a5",
   "label": "Article 5",
   "title": "Governance modes",
   "text": "The organization operates in one of four modes, chosen by the vital-signs review rather than at the discretion of whoever holds power, with the reading itself a bounded, recorded, contestable judgment rather than a discretion-free certainty: normal (consent in circles); contested (deliberation widens, a panel selected by lot may be convened); crisis (a named body may act quickly within strict limits, every crisis power carrying an automatic sunset and an externally verifiable trigger); and recovery (return to normal, with every expedited action audited and reversible). A non-derogable core holds in every mode: the dignity floor, the protection of members' ability to speak and contest, and the rule that every decision stays logged and reversible. Crisis may expedite containment but may never originate exile or permanent exclusion. Consent under Article 3 is compressed only as far as a mode requires, and is restored in full on the return to normal. At civilizational scale the framework names its modes abundance, scarcity, crisis, and recovery; normal and contested are the organizational settings of the first two, because in a body this size it is deliberation, not an economy, that widens and narrows."
  },
  {
   "id": "a6",
   "label": "Article 6",
   "title": "The justice of light",
   "text": "Harm is addressed in the open, proportionally, with standing to challenge built in. Where possible a matter goes first to a restorative process. If restoration fails or is unsafe, a separate rotating panel assigns a response on a tiered scale: containment (separation from the harm, never from humanity), a moral firebreak (time-limited removal from networks of trust, open to review), and, only for those who reject cooperative life entirely, non-reintegration (isolation without cruelty, every decision logged and revisable). The responsible party can always appeal through automatic periodic review. The same principles apply to the organization's own bodies; scale grants no immunity."
  },
  {
   "id": "a6b",
   "label": "Article 6b",
   "title": "Automated decisions",
   "text": "No consequential decision about a person is made by an automated system alone. Any such decision carries a right to a meaningful human review, an explanation of the logic actually used, and the same standing to challenge as any decision under Article 6. Software and models that act for the organization hold only scoped, decaying, revocable standing under Article 4, granted by a body that can withdraw it, and never the permanent, general authority Article 4 denies to any role. Where more than one such system could do the work, the organization keeps them plural rather than letting one model decide alone."
  },
  {
   "id": "a7",
   "label": "Article 7",
   "title": "The commons and its stewardship",
   "text": "The shared resources named above are held for the benefit of members and the wider community, not for private extraction. Decision records and the models that shape shared life are kept auditable by members, while personal data stays erasable. The stewardship structure we adopt is: [FILL block: commons] Where those resources yield a rent, from land, natural resources, or their kin, the organization may route that rent to a single-purpose trust that funds a floor and nothing else, built to survive being raided: principal entrenched and spent only from income, payout set by a published formula, accounts read by a seat chartered as deep as the corpus, and a tripwire that fires if the mandate broadens without a forced contest. If that trust is adopted, three further locks travel with it: a second key held outside the spending coalition, so a draw beyond the formula needs a keyholder the spenders do not appoint and every turning of the key is published; a named valuation bureau, permanently funded and publicly auditable, that assesses the rents under Article 8's legibility budget; and the anti-Nauru rule, that the trust never lends to the polity that charters it.",
   "fills": [
    {
     "key": "commons",
     "type": "block",
     "prompt": "For example: a steward body under a fiduciary duty of undivided loyalty; a purpose trust holding control rights; or a veto share that locks the mission."
    }
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "a7b",
   "label": "Article 7b",
   "title": "The more-than-human",
   "text": "Where the organization's work bears on a living system, a river, a forest, a fishery, a watershed, that system is given standing through a guardian rather than left as an unpriced externality. The guardian is plural, holds decaying standing under Article 4, is renewed from outside itself, and any member may force a re-reading of the system's interest, so no one speaks for nature unchallenged. Beneath it sits a floor the organization will not cross for any efficiency or majority: never knowingly driving a species to extinction, collapsing an ecosystem, or breaching a hard ecological limit."
  },
  {
   "id": "a8",
   "label": "Article 8",
   "title": "The vital-signs review",
   "text": "The organization names a small set of vital signs, each kept inside a survivable band rather than driven to a target, reviewed on a fixed cadence. Each sign is read as in band, drifting, or breached, and the readings set the governance mode. Indicators are watched for loss of resilience, not optimized as goals; measurement is decoupled from those it rewards; and a sign is treated as evidence for human judgment, never as an automatic trigger. One sign worth naming is a disagreement capacity, how much open, unresolved conflict the organization can hold without fracturing or silencing it, the companion to Article 3's contested register. A biological resilience sign, the health and preparedness of the people it affects, is another worth naming. Our vital signs are: [FILL block: vitalsigns] The review is read by a reading seat: plural, part-lot, tenured past those it reads for, never funded by what it reads, publishing its readings and dissents in full, its verdict binding unless publicly overridden with reasons by a named official on a deadline. Every sign that reads people carries a published legibility budget, a ceiling on individual-level leakage with individual reads forbidden outright beneath it. The organization also prices its own governance. It keeps and publishes the cost of running these organs in two currencies, money and member-hours, so the volunteer subsidy is counted rather than hidden, and it holds that cost inside a published band per scale that fails in both directions, bloat above and starvation below, read beside the floor's own finance at this review. The band's ceiling is the one falsifier F-10 sets: at cooperative scale, governance that eats more than two percent of the operating budget or more than five percent of member work-hours is too heavy. An entrenched budget without a published band bloats, and a published band without entrenchment starves, so the organization holds both. Our governance-overhead ledger and band are: [FILL block: overhead]",
   "fills": [
    {
     "key": "vitalsigns",
     "type": "block",
     "prompt": "The few load-bearing measures you will watch, each with its band (in / drifting / breached) and its review cadence."
    },
    {
     "key": "overhead",
     "type": "block",
     "prompt": "The governance cost in money and member-hours per year, and the band you will hold it inside at your scale; for example: under two percent of budget and five percent of member-hours, reviewed each quarter."
    }
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "a9",
   "label": "Article 9",
   "title": "Amendment, forking, and merger",
   "text": "This charter may be amended only by the following bar: [FILL inline: amendbar]. The clauses entrenched against ordinary change, and the only standing exceptions to the decay of Article 4, are Article 0 and the non-derogable core of Article 5. Any member or group may fork this charter and the commons they have contributed, under [FILL inline: license], taking only what they can carry and adapting the rest in the open. A legitimate fork follows the fork protocol. It takes its own name, files a divergence document at birth naming the disagreement and the evidence that would re-merge it, keeps the commons interoperable, and strips no one's standing. A fork and its parent may later merge by mutual ratification in a neutral venue, with the parent's governance concession pre-committed here. A split that claims the name, anathematizes the parent, or states no re-merge condition is a schism, and the judgment attaches to conduct, not persons.",
   "fills": [
    {
     "key": "amendbar",
     "type": "inline",
     "prompt": "e.g. a two-thirds vote after a full deliberation cycle and a published rationale"
    },
    {
     "key": "license",
     "type": "inline",
     "prompt": "the chosen open license"
    }
   ]
  },
  {
   "id": "adopt",
   "label": "Adoption",
   "title": "How to adopt it",
   "text": "Fill the blanks above. Start with one mechanism if that is all you can carry. Many groups begin with decaying standing on a single oversight body, or a citizens' panel for one decision, and grow from there. Ratify in the open, commit publicly to acting on what your own processes decide, and keep a falsification register that records what would make you change a rule."
  },
  {
   "id": "pitfalls",
   "label": "Eyes open",
   "title": "Known pitfalls",
   "text": "Charters fail in predictable ways. Watch for the informal hierarchy that grows where formal hierarchy is removed, the renewal that becomes a rubber stamp, the emergency that never ends, the metric that gets gamed once it becomes a target, the steward that captures the trust it was meant to hold, and the quiet conversion of value choices into technical readouts."
  },
  {
   "id": "terms",
   "label": "Terms",
   "title": "The terms, defined",
   "text": "The instruments the articles lean on, each in a sentence, collected here so the articles themselves read clean. Adaptive stability Enough and durability over endless growth, correction in proportion to harm. Cognitive sovereignty Protecting the conditions under which members can perceive and think for themselves. Cognitive ecology Keeping a real diversity of views and roles alive. The justice of light Responses to harm as legible and correctable as ordinary governance. The knowledge commons What we learn is held in common, auditable, and protected from enclosure. Consent A proposal carries unless a member raises a reasoned objection that it would harm the circle's purpose. Not unanimous enthusiasm; the absence of a reasoned, purpose-based objection. The contested register Where a disagreement is a conflict of values that will not converge, it is held in an open, adversarial venue with protected standing for the minority position, live and revisable, instead of being forced to a decision. The execution delay The published, irreducible gap between a proposal's adoption and its execution, scaled to the decision's weight, so no captured majority holds decision and execution in one window. Decaying standing Authority that lapses on a date unless affirmatively renewed after a real review. No role, seat, or mandate is permanent. The calibration schedule The published table naming every clocked role and its half-life band, tiered by the tempo of its domain, with the independence-bearing offices inverted to one long non-renewable term. No exempt adjacents Every role touching a clocked domain, staff, counsel, consultants, auditors, carries a clock in the same tier or the next one up, because decayed power migrates to whoever is exempt. Composting What happens when a body sunsets: powers lapse, assets return to the commons, records pass to the shared archive, and people are released and supported into other roles. An ending as a transfer, not a loss. The vested stake What travels with a member who leaves: the stake defined in advance, in peacetime, so exit rights are never a fiction and no one's stake is hostage to their staying. Contestation standing Access to the objection path and the records that concern them, held by non-members the organization's decisions demonstrably touch. The shadow earns contestation, not government. The non-derogable core The clauses no mode may suspend: the dignity floor, the protection of speech and contest, and the rule that every decision stays logged and reversible. The reading seat The constitution of any body that reads an instrument for the organization: plural, part-lot, tenured past those it reads for, never funded by what it reads, publishing its readings and dissents, binding unless publicly overridden with reasons. The legibility budget A published ceiling on how much individual-level information a people-reading sign may leak, with individual reads forbidden outright beneath it. The fork protocol What makes a split legitimate: its own name, a divergence document naming the disagreement and the evidence that would re-merge it, an interoperable commons, and no one stripped of standing."
  },
  {
   "id": "precedents",
   "label": "Precedents",
   "title": "The precedents, article by article",
   "text": "Every clause borrows from something that has been tried. The borrowings are collected here, labeled by article, so you can read further before you rely on any of it. Article 0 · The inviolable floor Precedent The ICCPR's non-derogable list and the European Convention's absolute Article 3 alongside German Basic Law Article 1; Waldron on dignity as rank; Kant. Some things are removed from the cost-benefit calculus entirely, and absoluteness attaches to enumerated treatments rather than to the word (the plural floor, EQ-06c). Article 2 · Membership and boundaries Precedent Ostrom's first design principle with the ICA principle of voluntary and open membership; staged entry as practiced at Twin Oaks and in Mondragon's refundable member stake; adult re-consent after the Anabaptist practice of baptism at majority; contestation for affected non-members in place of an exploding franchise (Pettit; Goodin). Binding only on those who actually joined. The full treatment is the Consent Layer (EQ-04e). Article 2b · Exit and the vested stake Precedent Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, exit written before any dispute with a procedure and a clock; Mondragon's refundable capital stake; the kibbutz record on unvested communal wealth as a lock (Abramitzky); Hirschman on exit and voice. The full treatment is the Consent Layer (EQ-04e). Article 3 · How decisions are made Precedent Sociocracy, with Holacracy as a later derivative (consent, the objection test, double-linking). Ostrom's collective-choice principle supports participatory rule-making more broadly. Irreducible value conflict is channeled rather than resolved (Mouffe on agonism; Berlin on value pluralism). Consent is the absence of a reasoned, purpose-based objection, not unanimous enthusiasm. Article 4 · Decaying standing Precedent The Texas Sunset model (review or abolish on a schedule); legislative term limits; staggered boards; organizational ecology on renewal through founding and retirement (Hannan and Freeman). The bands follow the calibration evidence: the term-limits record, where clocking the visible empowered the un-clocked (Kousser), and the central-bank and judicial-tenure record for the independence inversion (Alesina and Summers; Voigt). The known failure is rubber-stamp renewal, so the review must be real. Article 5 · Governance modes Precedent Management cybernetics and the Viable System Model; ICCPR Article 4 non-derogable rights; the Venice Commission; Ackerman on the emergency constitution, whose specific proposal is debated rather than settled. The sharpest danger is that crisis powers never expire. Article 6 · The justice of light Precedent Restorative justice (Braithwaite); responsive regulation (Ayres and Braithwaite); procedural legitimacy (Tyler); Ostrom's graduated sanctions. Article 6b · Automated decisions Precedent GDPR Article 22 and the CJEU SCHUFA and Dun and Bradstreet rulings (a right to human review and a meaningful explanation); the EU AI Act's human-oversight duty; Green on illusory oversight, so the review must be real. The full treatment is the Contested Mediator (EQ-03d). Article 7 · The commons and its stewardship Precedent Patagonia's purpose trust; the Purpose Foundation veto share; data trusts with independent trustees (ODI; Delacroix and Lawrence); and for a rent-funded floor, the commonwealth-trust record, Alaska's constitutional corpus and Norway's payout rule (EQ–02e). The risk is capture of the steward itself. Article 7b · The more-than-human Precedent The Whanganui River's legal personhood and its Te Pou Tupua guardians; rights of nature (Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?); Faith in Nature's guardian on the board; the public-trust doctrine. The risk is the guardian becoming a sovereign for nature, so it decays and stays contestable. The full treatment is the More-Than-Human Stake (EQ-08e). Article 8 · The vital-signs review Precedent Critical-transition and early-warning-signal science (Scheffer); the capability approach (Sen; Nussbaum); the doughnut corridor (Raworth); the reader-institution record and the census disclosure-avoidance record. The standing danger is Goodhart's law, so indicators rotate and no single number governs. Article 9 · Amendment, forking, and merger Precedent Open-source forking norms; the constitutional and non-constitutional change tracks of the Arbitrum DAO; the framework's own commitment to remain falsifiable."
  }
 ]
}