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. Every clause names the precedent it borrows from.
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 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 and consent
Who belongs and what is governed, stated plainly; decisions made by consent in linked circles, where a reasoned objection is worked through, not voted down. Value conflicts that will not converge go to a contested register instead of being forced to consent.
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. On sunset a body composts: its assets, records, and people return to the commons rather than scattering.
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.
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.
Amend and fork
A high bar to amend, an entrenched core, and a right to fork the charter and the commons as a release valve against capture and ossification.
- 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.
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.