The Equitist Model Charter
This is the full charter. The highlighted blanks are editable: type into them here, and the document fills in live. When it is ready, print it or save it as a PDF. Your entries are kept in this browser only. This charter is a living template, versioned on its own track and still a work in progress.
Authority is a loan
We, the members of , 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.
The inviolable floor
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.
Precedent: German Basic Law Article 1; Waldron on dignity as rank; Kant. Some things are removed from the cost-benefit calculus entirely.
The five commitments
The organization binds itself to five commitments that all other rules must serve: 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); the justice of light (responses to harm as legible and correctable as ordinary governance); and the knowledge commons (what we learn is held in common, auditable, and protected from enclosure).
Membership and boundaries
Membership is defined as follows:
The resources this charter governs are:
Precedent: Ostrom's first design principle (clear boundaries on who draws from the resource) with the ICA principle of voluntary and open membership (non-discriminatory entry). Open to join, bounded in what is drawn.
How decisions are made
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.
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.
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.
Decaying standing
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. Our terms are:
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.
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 known failure is rubber-stamp renewal, so the review must be real.
Governance modes
The organization operates in one of four modes, chosen by the vital-signs review, never by the discretion of whoever holds power: 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.
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.
The justice of light
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.
Precedent: restorative justice (Braithwaite); responsive regulation (Ayres and Braithwaite); procedural legitimacy (Tyler); Ostrom's graduated sanctions.
The commons and its stewardship
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:
Precedent: Patagonia's purpose trust; the Purpose Foundation veto share; data trusts with independent trustees (ODI; Delacroix and Lawrence). The risk is capture of the steward itself.
The vital-signs review
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:
Precedent: critical-transition and early-warning-signal science (Scheffer); the capability approach (Sen; Nussbaum); the doughnut corridor (Raworth). The standing danger is Goodhart's law, so indicators rotate and no single number governs.
Amendment, forking, and merger
This charter may be amended only by the following bar: . 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 , taking only what they can carry and adapting the rest in the open. A fork and its parent may later merge by mutual ratification. A right to fork is a release valve against capture and ossification, not a license for endless schism, so forks publish their reasons.
Precedent: open-source forking norms; the constitutional and non-constitutional change tracks of the Arbitrum DAO; the framework's own commitment to remain falsifiable.
How to adopt it
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.
Known pitfalls
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.