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Foundation · Governance Corpus
Eight foundational documents · ratified and published
The governance corpus is the Foundation's binding ethical commitment, ratified by its Board and published as the public record against which the Foundation's actions can be evaluated. Each document is short by design — these are governance constraints, not policy frameworks. The structural relationships between them are deliberate.
The Source Code Declaration is the foundational ethical constant. The STAN Ethical Enforcement Logic operationalizes the Source Code as four blocking primitives. Five further documents implement the Source Code through specific domains — IP custody, anti-capture protections, temporal continuity, transitional ethical authority, and conflict-of-interest discipline. A structural transparency note documents the commercial-side relationships the Foundation operates alongside.
Principle of Irreversibility
Once adopted, these documents may not be weakened or bypassed through ordinary governance processes. Amendment requires supermajority approval of disinterested directors and written findings that human protection is not diminished. Ambiguity is resolved in favor of human protection and ethical containment. The corpus is designed to survive leadership changes, organizational growth, and external pressure.
Tier 1 — Foundational Ethical Constants
Foundational Ethical Constant
The single binding ethical statement that governs all Foundation activity. People — keeping them safe, healthy, connected, in truth, and empowered with agency. Structural invariant, not mission statement.
Foundational Enforcement Framework
Four blocking enforcement primitives: Stewardship, Truth, Agency, Navigation. Decision logic, not values. Failure of any single primitive constitutes ethical misalignment.
Tier 2 — Stewardship and Protection
IP Stewardship and Licensing Authority
All core IP held in custodial stewardship, not as commodity. Sale and permanent alienation prohibited. Licenses are the sole permitted commercial interface and remain subordinate to the Source Code.
Protection Against Institutional Capture
No accumulation of capital, market share, or influence creates ethical authority. Money flows downstream of ethics, never upstream. Governance is intentionally asymmetric.
Temporal Governance Ratchet
Foundational principles persist across leadership changes, growth phases, and external pressure. Amendment requires extraordinary process. Irreversibility is a design feature, not a limitation.
Tier 3 — Operational Discipline
Transitional Governance Safeguard · 24-Month Sunset
Negative-only veto authority over actions that would violate foundational documents. Time-limited. Confers no executive authority. Sunsets upon establishment of an Ethics Board.
Procedural Integrity
Recusal procedures for the Founder's dual role as Foundation steward and operator of an affiliated IP-licensing entity. Disinterested-director approval required for conflicted matters.
Commercial-Side Relationship Disclosure
Documents the commercial-side relationships the Foundation operates alongside — including the licensing entity, early capital arrangements, and the principled commitments that scope them.
The corpus is hierarchical but tightly coupled. The Source Code defines who the system serves. STAN defines how the Source Code is enforced. The five domain documents implement specific protections — IP custody, anti-capture, continuity, transitional ethical authority, and founder conflict-of-interest discipline. The structural transparency note documents the commercial relationships the Foundation operates alongside without compromising the corpus.
The Continuity & Irreversibility Clause is the meta-document — it constrains how the corpus itself may change. Amendment requires supermajority of disinterested directors, explicit articulation of ethical impact, and written findings that human protection is not diminished. The corpus is, by design, harder to weaken than to strengthen.
Where conflict exists between any of these documents and any bylaw, policy, contract, or board resolution, the foundational documents prevail. Where ambiguity exists, the interpretation that most preserves ethical durability, reversibility of harm, and human protection governs.
— The corpus is small on purpose. Eight short documents are easier to enforce than
fifty long ones.
