A constitution you can fork.
A template that encodes the framework into clauses a cooperative, assembly, municipality, or institution can adopt. Copy it, fill the blanks, keep what fits, and bind yourself only to the rule that it can be changed by the process written inside it. The precedents each clause borrows from, and the terms the articles lean on, are collected at the end of the full charter, so the articles themselves read clean.
Ten short articles, written to be adopted and adapted. The full text, with the bracketed blanks to fill and the precedent behind each clause, is in the forkable charter. The charter is versioned on its own track; its version history records what each release changed, and the current release ships as machine-readable data for clause-by-clause diffs and forks.
The inviolable floor
Dignity is non-tradeable. No vote, emergency, or majority may reach it, and where any clause conflicts with it, the floor prevails.
The five commitments
Adaptive stability, cognitive sovereignty, cognitive ecology, the justice of light, and the knowledge commons, as binding principles all other rules must serve.
Boundaries, consent, and exit
Membership entered by stages and an explicit adult act, never by birth or silence, with contestation standing for those the organization touches but who never joined; exit codified in peacetime with a procedure, a clock, and a vested stake that travels. Decisions made by consent in linked circles, where a reasoned objection is worked through, not voted down, and value conflicts that will not converge go to a contested register instead of being forced to consent. Between a proposal and its execution stands a published delay scaled to the decision's weight, so a captured majority never holds decision and execution in one window.
Decaying standing
Every role and body carries a term and a sunset. Authority lapses unless it is affirmatively renewed after a review in which non-renewal is a real option, with the term set by the domain's tempo, on the calibrated bands of EQ–05d, with clocks on adjacent roles too. On sunset a body composts: its assets, records, and people return to the commons rather than scattering. The Sunset Calendar tracks the clocks.
Governance modes
Four modes, normal to crisis, set by the vital-signs review rather than by whoever holds power, with a non-derogable core no mode can touch.
The justice of light
Harm addressed in the open, restoration first, then proportional and reviewable tiers, with standing to challenge built in. Scale grants no immunity.
Automated decisions
No consequential decision about a person is made by software alone: a right to human review, an explanation, and standing to challenge, with any model held to decaying standing and never sovereign.
Commons and vital signs
Shared resources held under fiduciary stewardship or a mission-locking trust; a small set of vital signs watched as bands to hold, not numbers to maximize, among them its disagreement capacity and the biological resilience of the people it affects. The review is read by a reading seat, never funded by what it reads and binding unless publicly overridden with reasons, and every people-reading sign carries a published legibility budget. The organization also prices its own governance in money and member-hours and holds it inside a published band, and a trust that funds a floor carries a second key, a valuation bureau, and the anti-Nauru rule.
The more-than-human
A living system the work affects is given standing through a plural, decaying, contestable guardian, beneath a floor no efficiency may cross, no driven extinction or ecosystem collapse.
Amend and fork
A high bar to amend, an entrenched core, and a right to fork under the fork protocol: a new name, a divergence document naming what would re-merge it, an interoperable commons, and no one stripped of standing, so the release valve against capture and ossification never becomes an identity war.
- Fill the brackets. Name the organization, the membership, the resources, the terms, the vital signs, and the amendment bar.
- Start with one mechanism. Many groups begin with decaying standing on a single oversight body, or a citizens' panel for one decision, and grow from there. Partial adoption is the normal case.
- Ratify in the open, and commit publicly to acting on what your own processes decide.
- Keep a falsification register. Write down what would make you change a rule, and review it.
- Measure where you stand as you go. The readiness assessment scores an organization or polity against the standard across its commitments, mechanisms, and vital signs, and names the gaps.
Charters fail in predictable ways, and naming them is part of the design. 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, the consensus that quietly erases dissent rather than holding it, the sunset turned into a weapon against an inconvenient body, and the quiet conversion of value choices into technical readouts. The framework's red-team section sets out each failure mode and what resists it.